Do you want to support events in your RESTful API portfolio?
Then the brand-new book Webhooks – Events for RESTful APIs is right for you. The book is packed with best practices and design templates for extending your API portfolio with a modern webhook infrastructure. So you can offer both APIs and events that developers love to use.
So, what exactly is inside the book?
In chapter 2, we study several approaches for realizing events, such as Polling, Long Polling, Webhooks, HTTP Streaming, Server-Sent Events, WebSockets, WebSub and GraphQL Subscriptions. All of these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages.
But when it comes to realizing events for RESTful APIs, the most common approach we observe in the field are webhooks. This is why we focus on webhooks in this book. In chapter 3, we study the webhooks concepts and the overall architecture of a webhooks infrastructure.
What makes webhooks great? When they are developer-friendly, easy to use, reliable, secure and highly available. In chapter 4, we study the non-functional requirements of a webhooks infrastructure, in areas such as security, reliability and developer experience.
How do well-known API providers respond to the challenge of designing webhooks for their API portfolio? In chapter 6, we examine the webhook infrastructure provided by GitHub, BitBucket, Stripe, Slack, and Intercom.
Based on the non-functional requirements, best practices, and the webhooks we observed from well-known API providers, we propose a concrete webhook design in chapter 5. But simply offering webhooks next to an API portfolio is not sufficient. APIs and the webhooks infrastructure need to be well-coordinated. We show how to integrate webhooks into a RESTful API portfolio and express our design using the OpenAPI description language.
Finally, there is one more practical piece of advice. In chapter 7, we provide some practical tips and tools for developing, debugging, and testing webhooks.
Get your copy of the Webhooks Book today, as a PDF, as an EPUB for your e-reader or as a Printed Paperback Book.
