I don’t know what IFTTT does, but if you write your own API app (which is the paradigm used by the php endpoint tutorial), you can register for events you care about in your groovy app and when they fire, send http requests from the app to your custom endpoint.
The docs here have been extremely helpful to me in my own development, and they list, among other things, the standard REST request functions. I have not actually used them yet myself, though, so I can’t say for sure that they work…but the functionality I think you’re asking for is documented as already existing.
Try it out and let us know!