Webhooks are a sign that API platforms that have matured to the point where they have begun identifying the meaningful events that are occurring via their platforms. Webhooks demonstrate that platform usage has grown to the point where there is enough activity, and API usage, where application developers have begun needing notifications when meaningful changes have occurred. Instead of having developers poll an API looking for changes, platforms have begun sending notifications and pushing updates to developers using webhooks–making API consumption a two-way street, and more real time.
To help understand the landscape of providers who are making this shift towards being more event-driven, and offering webhook solutions for their communities, we wanted to aggregate a handful of them here for our customers to learn from. Here are 20 of the top API providers who have established webhook solutions in place:
– Github – Social coding.
– Stripe – Billing and payments.
– SendGrid – Email
– Braintree – Payments.
– Shopify – Shopping and commerce.
– Xero – – Accounting.
– Intercom – Support
– Twitch – Video.
– Shipwire – Shipping and logistics.
– Dropbox – Documents and storage.
– Actuity – Scheduling.
– Twitter – Social and messaging.
– Uber – Transportation.
– Mixpanels – Analytics.
– Hipchat – Chat.
– Recurly – Billing.
– Autodesk – Computer assisted design.
– Jira – Code projects.
– Transifex – Translation.
This is just a thin slice of the webhooks available out there today. When you look through these providers you will notice each of the providers have begun to define the types of events that occur, providing a standard set of events that developers can subscribe to. Things like new payments, shipments, invoices, messages, and the other common events that are occurring around the valuable resources being exposed via their APIs.
We will keep profiling API webhook implementations, building a catalog of the most mature API providers that exist across the landscape in a variety of industries. They all provide interesting lessons around how platforms are becoming more event-driven in order to respond to the needs of their most demanding customers. In these situations, the next step is almost always needing to actually begin streaming data using solutions like Server-Sent Events (SSE), making Streamdata.io a pretty attractive solution.