A WebHook named ‘Jeff’

Jeff as a webhook

PROBLEM: Help people understand how cool webhooks are.
PROBLEM: Find out when there’s new content on a site.

SOLUTION: Put a webhook into the site’s search indexing tool – SOLR.
SOLUTION: Custom SOLR Token Filter.

The code, while JAVA and therefore evil, is trivial.

WHY?

Every cool web app (sooner or later) has some cool content in it. So you add a search engine. When your users want to build mashups with that content, you add webhooks to that engine. And you’re done.

Starting point: http://e-mats.org/2008/06/writing-a-solr-analysis-filter-plugin/

GOTCHAS:
JAVA – Evil and Stupid
Java classpath (on Mac) – also Evil and Stupid
Java permissions (to connect to remote servers) – http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5309619

WHERE IS THIS GOING TO LIVE?

Webhooks coming to NASA soon...

FINAL TAKEAWAY: Fitz was right – everything should be HTTP.