What are webhoooks and what is an example?

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Webhooks is a communication design pattern and it's a popular way for apps to provide real-time information to other apps via sending automated messages. They're automated messages sent from apps when something happens (a trigger event).

In the webhooks design, there are 3 main parts:

- Webhook origin: App where trigger event happens
- Webhook recipient: App that processes data sent from the webhook origin
- Webhook URL: The URL or address (lives within the webhook recipient) that the webhook origin sends message to when trigger event happens

Here's a real-world example:

Let's say you set up a webhook on your Slack channel to get a message whenever a new task is added to your Jira sprint board (or whichever project management tool you use).

A team member creates a new task on the team's Jira board (trigger event) → the Jira app (webhook origin) sends a message to Slack's webhook URL (webhook recipient) → the Slack app posts a message to your Slack channel with the data it received from the Jira app.

How webhooks are used in the real-world

There are 2 important things to note about webhooks:
- First, the webhook origin sends messages to the webhook recipient automatically when the trigger event happens. The automation is what makes webhooks so powerful and so widely used.
- Second, webhooks are uni-directional communication. This means the webhook origin app can send a message to the webhook recipient, but the webhook recipient won't initiate connection and message sending to the webhook origin. This point is important to differentiate between webhooks and websockets.

Webhooks is the technology you're leveraging when using workflow automation tools like Zapier. Workflow automation tools like Zapier has webhook URLs from thousands of apps and allow you to plug-and-play any of these webhooks together to create automatic and seamless workflows.