Software and data
Webhook
A message one system sends to another the moment something happens, so the second system does not have to keep asking.
What webhook means in practice
The difference from an API call is direction. With an API your system asks repeatedly whether anything has changed. With a webhook the other system tells you the instant it does, which is both faster and considerably cheaper in effort.
Webhooks are what make automation feel immediate rather than scheduled: a payment arrives and the job is marked paid straight away, rather than at the next hourly check. The thing to know is that delivery is not guaranteed, so anything built on them needs to cope with a message arriving twice or not at all. That is ordinary engineering, but it is the part that separates something reliable from something that mostly works.
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