Simple way to host a webhook

techguy

I'm in the process of building an automated component for my new project. This component needs to react to PayPal transactions in near realtime.

While my program does run on an AWS EC2 instance, I don't want to really setup a webserver especially for my trivial problem.

I need to host a web-hook that PayPal IPN can call whenever I receive a payment.

In the age of cloud and PaaS I believe there is probably a simple solution to this. Also, how can I link it back to trigger my Java application via a command line interface?

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance..

EDIT :: I meant to say that I am currently looking into AWS Lambda, which seems promising.

Talisman

Have you looked at Zapier?

techguy

Talisman wrote: »

Have you looked at Zapier?

Well, that looks good but I don't think it will work for my solution as my app is custom. Zapier only works with apps they integrate with.

I've looked at lambda and it looks complicated to plumb back to my Java app.

I may host a minimal web server in Java and whitelist the PayPal servers in AWS EC2 security group.

Also, I'm reluctant to integrate third party services such as Zapier to solve trivial problems. I don't want my solution to be dependent on a bunch of other services.

Talisman

If you are rolling your own solution do you have any particular requirements? I don't imagine you'll need anything too complicated if you're just creating an endpoint to feed messages to your application.

Openshift has a free service plan which allows you to host up to three applications.

There's a myriad of other PAAS solutions that you could use to host the simple webhook app.

techguy

Talisman wrote: »

If you are rolling your own solution do you have any particular requirements? I don't imagine you'll need anything too complicated if you're just creating an endpoint to feed messages to your application.

Openshift has a free service plan which allows you to host up to three applications.

There's a myriad of other PAAS solutions that you could use to host the simple webhook app.

I don't believe my requirements to be too complicated. The only issue is that currently I need GUI access to be be able to run Chrome via Selenium. That's the only problem I think.

I've actually gone with Dropwizard to create the endpoint in Java. I will be hosting it on my EC2 instance and whitelisting PayPal IPN servers so it's not generally available.

I'm happy with the solution and get to try out Dropwizard which is supposed to be pretty neat.

Talisman

techguy wrote: »

The only issue is that currently I need GUI access to be be able to run Chrome via Selenium.

Is this because your app doesn't expose an API?

techguy

Talisman wrote: »

Is this because your app doesn't expose an API?

No but because I need to interact with another site that doesn't expose an API. It's a pain.

It's selenium for now, but I will use PhantomJS or something later for a headless solution.