[yajoe]

At the bottom of the page I saw:

> An initiative by Zapier 2013.

Zapier is a company that makes money off sites having REST endpoints to push and pull data. It looks like Zapier would prefer that more sites have endpoints to accept push, and this marketing effort is a brand-campaign (think Public Service Announcement) to get more people to tailor their products to work with Zapier.

That explains why more emphasis was put on marketing, etc. The primary audience is not developers but PHBs and PMs to have sound bytes to parrot to developers.

(I'm not cynical, I work in advertising, most of my products already have 'REST hooks'...)

[jqueryin]

As I read through the website, I felt mislead by the title "REST Hooks - Stop the polling madness" in that I believed we were talking directly about reducing something like AJAX long polling for an alternative means of retrieving data from the backend.

Having felt that pain before, and not opting for WebSockets yet, I was hoping for some kind of simple alternative. I have a portion of code that occurs during a registration process that is currently polling the backend for status updates as to the worker queue's progress (it's a lengthy registration with several moving pieces and calls to multiple remote APIs).

[IanCal]

Try playing with WebSockets, they're pretty easy to get going. Is there something about them keeping you away? Or would it require quite a re-architecture?

[jqueryin]

There's a lack of browser support (IE10+, no Android), and the fallbacks drain your mobile battery. It's just not quite there. I've done full presentations on WebSockets and toyed/demoed with it for a number of trivial and less than trivial applications, so I would like to think I'm more informed than most.

[johnny22]

server sent events? although they are push only. I can't tell if you also want write capabilities

[bryanh]

Bingo!