Webhooks.org Working Group

[John Sheehan]

With @progrium's blessing, I'm spearheading an effort to revamp and relaunch webhooks.org. I have a few goals in mind for the project, but I wanted to start a conversation with the evented web community to get ideas and contribution commitments from others as well. 

As a starting point, here are my goals for this project:

• Updated design
  
• Non-commercial (not sponsored or owned by any one entity)
  
• Agnostic to implementations (no favored nation)
  
• Open contributor model via GitHub pages with a core team to review/publish changes
  

Here's a rough idea of how I could see it being organized:

• Home page: Overview of what they are and benefits of using
  
• Implementation styles: overview of various forms ("classic", HTTP Subscriptions, PuSH, RestHooks, etc.)
  
• Companies that have implemented them and how they use it
  
• Free and commercial tools for working with them
  
• Resources (news, OSS projects, links, etc. possibly extracted from apidigest.com?)
  

This is where you come in: 

1. What would you like to see on the site?
   
2. Are you willing to be an active, ongoing content contributor?

Please let me know your thoughts in this thread by October 11th so that I can start on coordinating the design.

John

Runscope

[Julien Genestoux]

John, I'm excited about that!

I like your goals for the project, but I'd make #1 goal an educational one: how do we get more people aware and confident in using webhooks for their apps.

So I think it'd be awesome if the site had a few step by step guides like: "how to create a webhook" and "how to create an API that will provide a webhook mechanism".
One thing that I'd want to see happening is a better community around the webhooks so people share their experiences running an API or building a tool that uses
a hook. Hopefully we will growing lowest common denominators to create a de facto standard for anyone who wants to get started.

I'd be more than happy to be a contributor, in any way I can help (either personally of thru Superfeedr).

[Mike Kelly]

Hi John,

It seems like having a goal of

> Non-commercial (not sponsored or owned by any one entity)

and maintaining a list of

> Companies that have implemented them and how they use it

are in conflict.

Cheers,
M

[Jeff Lindsay]

John,

I'm not seeing the conflict. Maybe you can better explain the concern.

-jeff

M

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Jeff Lindsay
http://progrium.com

[Mike Kelly]

If it's non-commercial, how do you decide how much attention each case
study gets, who is at the top of the list, who does or doesn't get to
go on the list, etc?

Out of interest; who are the current team, what are their commercial
affiliations?

By the way, don't get me wrong it doesn't actually bother me that much
- I just think you should drop "non-commercial" a goal.

Cheers,
M

Mike

http://twitter.com/mikekelly85
http://github.com/mikekelly
http://linkedin.com/in/mikekelly123

[John Sheehan]

Mike, 

Thanks for the feedback. My fault for not drawing a clearer distinctions about what I meant in regards to commercial intent.

I think we can objectively list/explain in-the-wild use cases without them being commercials for a product. One of the biggest things I hear is "how are people using webhooks?" and the more examples of working implementations we can provide, the better we can answer that question.

Same goes for the tooling section. We (Runscope) obviously stand to benefit from people knowing about our tools. But they should know about all the tools, not just ours and especially the free/OSS options available as well. Again, I think this can be done objectively without solicitation.

John

[Mike Kelly]

Exactly, which is fine by me but it seems like it would be a lot less
hassle for you to just drop "non-commercial" as a goal all together?

Cheers,
M

[Jeff Lindsay]

Yeah, perhaps non-commercial is implicit in being open source, maybe content under Creative Commons, and evident in the content in itself. Regardless, I believe the point was to be "vendor neutral" more than anything.

M

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[John Sheehan]

Each study gets equal weight as much as possible. This is why we need multiple people involved with deciding what goes where.

So far the team is me and Julien based on this thread. He's with Superfeedr, I'm with Runscope. But the more the better. Any competitor to my company is strongly encouraged to participate. By not having one company drive this (I see myself as just a project manager) I think we'll avoid conflicts. 

Jeff has set a great precedent around how projects like this should be handled and with everyone's help and commitment to offering a resource without expectation of commercial gain, we can further those ideals.

[John Sheehan]

Yeah, vendor-neutral is a better term. Let's go with that. And CC licensed content is a great idea too.

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[Mike Kelly]

Ok great, good luck - keep us posted!

Cheers,
M

[Martyn Loughran]

John, this sounds great!

Most of my recent experience has been as a WebHook provider (at Pusher). I'm very happy to share all my thoughts on the implementation of WebHook sending at scale, making WebHooks debuggable for developers, retrying, dealing with badly behaved receivers, when to notify on failure, etc.

I'd like to see stronger guidance about the format of WebHooks, in order to make adopting WebHooks easier for both providers and consumers. I would say there is a lot of consensus already, but the lack of guidance means that every implementer needs to expend unnecessary thought on what are, at the end of the day, fairly unimportant implementation details; it's also harder to share code than it could be.

Subscriptions / RestHooks is another area that would massively benefit from assembling current practices together, listing the use cases, pros and cons, and making some recommendations. There are lots of options (hence indecision), but I'm sure we can all get behind the vision of a future where this is just the way things work!

Martyn

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[Steven Willmott]

I think this is a great idea - happy to help if we can. We don't provide a webhooks engine or anything like that but run across a lot of people that are or should be using them. (Content provision we can likely send case studies your way.)

I do think having a list of "who uses them" is a really important (maybe even the most important thing) to get people to think seriously about doing it themselves. I don't know that that and "non-commercial" are mutually exclusive, but "vendor neutral" seems fine to me to.

+1 for creative commons content.

 steve.

[Scott C. Lemon]

I'm very interested in seeing this move forward, and become solidified.  I'm working on a series of Internet of Things devices that are implementing webhooks ... but not currently supporting the subscribe.  I've been debating if I add it into the firmware now, in the current state.

Obviously knowing that there is a larger agreement behind the "standard" would have me feel much more comfortable.

Let me know how I can assist!

[ja...@webhooks.io]

John,

I think the idea is great and we (webhooks.io) would certainly be interested in helping out where we can - just let me know.

Thanks,

Jason

[Derek Foreman]

Julien, 

+1 on the how to's. Common scenarios and examples would be a great addition.