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Webhooks Explained Simply… With Car Shopping!
Event-driven architectures are hard technical concepts to understand. But if you’ve ever been car shopping, you might know more about them than you realize.
Webhooks. Some developers love them, some developers hate them. Non-developers love saying it. It’s a fun word. Sounds like something Spiderman would use in a fight.
But they aren’t. They are a modern software principle used in pub/sub architectures to notify subscribers when certain events occur in a system.
Woah woah woah.
Let’s break that down a little bit. That was a lot of fancy words strung together.
To help illustrate webhooks and their purpose, we’re going to use car shopping as a metaphor.
The Problem
In spring of last year I was in the market for a new car. I really wanted a Jeep Wrangler. So I went to the internet and searched across dozens of car dealerships to see what was in stock.
Unfortunately for me, I’m pretty picky and did not like anything I saw.
So I kept going back day after day, checking if any of these dealerships had something new. Most days, nothing new would come in. Other days, a new Wrangler would come in, but it wasn’t a color or year that I was looking for.
Before I knew it, I had spent a significant amount of time asking these dealerships for the same thing over and over again.
It would be really nice to just be notified when something comes in that matches what I want.
I went into the Jeep dealer to check the lot myself. Of course, nothing matched my criteria. So I asked the dealer to give me a call whenever a red, blue, green, or yellow Jeep came in.
I stopped browsing their website every day and waited for a call. Sure enough, about two weeks later I got a call and long story short — I’m happily driving my new Wrangler.
So how does this relate to webhooks?
What Is A Webhook?
A webhook is an API that accepts data from a publisher. The publisher is triggered by…
