Introducing Webhooks

Webhooks are simple callbacks that are rapidly growing in popularity with a lot of developers. Webhooks work in a very similar way to Lambda functions; they are invoked when a particular event is fired by an application on the web. This makes them highly applicable to a variety of web development use cases where, rather than having a traditional API that polls for data on a frequent basis, you use a Webhook to get data at real time.

Note

With most APIs there's a request followed by a response, whereas in the case of Webhooks, they simply send the data whenever it's available.

The way a Webhook works is quite simple! To use a Webhook, you register a URL with the Webhook provider, for example IFTTT or Zapier. The URL is a place within your application that will accept the data and do something with it. In some cases, you can tell the provider the situations when you'd like to receive data. Whenever there's something new, the Webhook will send it to your URL.

Here's a common...