We must acknowledge the fact that WebSockets and Webhooks are two highly effective protocols that have helped redefine the concept of real-time communication and data transfer on the internet. We are proud to announce that Zoom has launched WebSockets in beta to offer you even more tools to give you the power to create innovative and engaging experiences for the people around the world. In this article, we will discuss how you can utilize webhooks and web sockets so that you can deploy an application or integrate the Zoom platform to use the company’s video-based communications services, or integrate the Zoom platform into your application.

What are webhooks and WebSockets?

Modern applications rely heavily on webhooks and web sockets to provide event notification services that are essential in providing the best service to their users. It is possible to receive notifications in real time about events in your Zoom account by using both webhooks and WebSockets and both services are available in Zoom. Moreover, these platforms provide support for applications that need to respond to changes or updates as soon as those changes are made. When deciding which is right for your use case, you should consider key differences between webhooks and WebSockets, including ease of implementation, speed of delivery, reliability, architecture, etc.

Comparing webhooks and WebSockets

Protocols and ease of implementation

As opposed to WebSockets, which use the WebSocket protocol (ws or wss) instead of Webhooks which use HTTP. This is one of the reasons for which webhooks are generally easier to set up, since they only need an endpoint URL to receive HTTP POST requests, as opposed to an entire website. It is more complex to setup WebSockets since you need to obtain an access token and open a connection with the server in order for them to work.

Speed of delivery

Due to the fact that they offer a duplex communication channel, WebSockets are generally faster when it comes to the delivery of data than Webhooks. In order to allow the exchange of data between the client and server in real time, WebSockets enable the establishment of a single connection between the client and server without having to make additional HTTP requests. Persistent connections are often more performant than webhooks in terms of delivering event notifications and consuming resources more efficiently, as compared with webhooks.

Reliability

It is essential to consider reliability when evaluating event-based communication options. When an event occurs, webhooks notify a specific URL by sending a notification based on the event. Nevertheless, if there are any problems with the endpoint, the event notification may not be processed in a correct manner. The WebSocket protocol, on the other hand, maintains a persistent connection with the server, making communication between the client and server more secure and reliable.

Architecture

There is a “push” model for Webhooks, which means Zoom sends event notifications to endpoints as soon as they occur, according to the “push” model. In order to use WebSockets, the client is required to establish a connection with the server and then receive event notifications as they happen, which is a “pull” model.

Stateless vs. stateful

This is because webhooks are stateless in the sense that they carry full information about each event independently and do not carry any state information. There is a stateful aspect to WebSockets, which means that the client and server maintain a persistent connection throughout the lifetime of the connection, which allows them to share state information throughout the process.

Use cases

In some cases, webhooks may be more suitable as a solution than using a service-based solution, if the app only needs to receive a few event notifications. In our scenario, we will take the example that you have a marketplace app that requires a notification to be sent when a meeting is created, updated, or deleted by a user. As you can see, webhooks are the best solution in this case since the app only needs to receive a small number of event notifications (i.e., notifications connected to meetings) to function properly. There are many advantages to implementing WebSockets over setting up a simple endpoint that receives these notifications via webhooks.

There are many industries that are using WebSockets for developing applications such as banking, finance, and healthcare, and these can be good options for those developers. In order to ensure their endpoints are secure when implementing webhooks, developers must make extra efforts to ensure that they validate the request and whitelist the IPs that are connected to the endpoint. A WebSocket is a secure protocol that allows direct connections between a client and the server, which reduces the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks, which in return, ensures an extra layer of security over HTTP, since the connection is established between the client and server directly. As WebSockets move data only when the connection is open, they provide a more reliable connection, since data can only be transferred when they are opened, and they remain open until they are closed by the developer. The good thing about Zoom WebSockets is that, as well as being able to open the connection only using the access token generated by the app that created the subscription, there can also only be one connection open at a time, which means that only one connection can be used at a given time. It should be noted that despite their relatively low latency, one of the major advantages of WebSockets over Webhooks is their ability to communicate in real-time, despite their low latency. This is extremely important for use cases where it is important for updates to be on-time.

Engaging experiences require the use of essential tools

WebSockets are now standard tools for building interactive web applications because they are the most widely used technology for achieving low latency, scalability, and seamless updates on the web. Zoom uses these cutting-edge technologies in order to create a user experience that is engaging as well as intuitive. There are a variety of different event notifiers that can help unlock the full potential of your app, regardless of whether it is a customer engagement system or a monitoring system.

We have created documentation for both WebSockets (beta) and Webhooks (PI) to make it easy for you to start. For early access to this new feature, you will need to sign up for the WebSockets Beta program by completing this form.

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