So what are Gemcutter webhooks? It’s a way to automatically notice an online app (say gemhooker.appspot.com for instance) about the activities of your favorite (or all) Gemcutter’s gems...

As mentioned in the documentation, let’s install gemcutter’s gem if not already done:

Now this is done, let’s get it started and fire up a new Python’s powered GAE app (gemhooker.py):

If you deploy this app (with appcfg.py update gemhooker-clone-you-just-initialized), you won’t see anything so let’s ask Gemcutter to add a webhook that will notice our app everytime someone pushes changes onto Gemcutter! I’m subscribing to every event of all the existing gems:

You can see the result on gemhooker.appspot.com.

Nick Quanranto has done it (and it looks good, really good job!) using Ruby and deployed it on Heroku.

I wish I could have done this with Ruby too but as I need to make it work with Wave (and it seems like a PITA to make Rails 2.x work on AppEngine), I’ll suffer till the end of this project :)

In part 2, I’ll explain how to make a Wave Gadget.