I like your suggestion that webhooks are part of a...

2009-02-18T16:15:06.974-08:00

I like your suggestion that webhooks are part of a progression towards XMPP-based pushing. I agree that there is a lot about HTTP that is designed for the pull case -- what's more is that the mental model in the vast majority of web programmer is setup for the pull case. While the success of webhooks so far suggests that HTTP is pretty flexible, the fact that they are only becoming visible now attests to how much programmers like their existing paradigms.

I predict that the PRESENCE aspect of XMPP will be very useful when people get around to linking up services with XMPP message passing. I think you'd like to know (even before you've got a message to send) if some add-on component of your service is alive and available. In hooks-land, you don't know until its too late that the other end isn't there. Yeah yeah, if stable production sites only post to other stable production sites then you can sorta sweep this issue under the rug, but not having a clear answer for what it means when the other end doesn't answer (or doesn't answer the way you'd expect) means mashups will always be on shaky ground.

When end users start getting hit by the Push Revolution there is going to be a big divide between those people who can easy accept posts natively and those who have to employ weird workarounds to get messages delivered to them. With XMPP this is solved up front because messages for user@host are delivered via server-to-server protocols and the average user isn't expected to have the ability to accept random incoming connections.

We could address these issues for webhooks with conventions for poking hook consumers with are-you-alive?-I'm-just-curious messages that don't count as delivering data (but this would fly in the face of the "just post all of your data to the url" scheme for the general idea of hooks) and making big aggregator/router/proxy thingies for firewalled users to connect out to for hooks to be accepted on their behalf (but then the fact that the proxy responded one way doesn't assure you that the client would respond that way if you hit them directly). But let's not make this part of our roadmap for certain.

Yeah, let's get hooks out there to GET PEOPLE THINKING PUSHY, but let's not say its the end-all solution when we have an existing protocol that comes with some great solutions. Once you get "web application architecture" types thinking with push message, THEN you can tell them about XMPP. Until then its protocol soup.

Comments on Egocity: Developer's Edition: On Webhooks, or The Push Revolution

I like your suggestion that webhooks are part of a...