As many know, we've been on a massive sprint to improve the spec - both fixing omissions where features have been implemented in the reference servers but were never formalised in the spec, and fixing bugs where the spec has thinkos which stop us from being able to ratify it as stable and thus fit for purpose .
In practice, our target has been to cut stable releases of all the primary Matrix APIs by the end of August - effectively declaring Matrix out of beta, at least at the specification level. For context: historically only one API has ever been released as stable - the Client Server API, which was the result of a similar sprint back in Jan 2016. This means that the Server Server (SS) API, Identity Service (IS) API, Application Service (AS) API and Push Gateway API have never had an official stable release - which has obviously been problematic for those implementing them.
However, as of the end of Friday Aug 31, we're proud to announce the first ever stable releases of the IS, AS and Push APIs!
This is the result of a lot of work which spans the whole Spec Core Team, but has been particularly driven by TravisR, who has taken the lead on this whole mission to improve the spec. Huge thanks are due to Travis for his work here, and also massive thanks to everyone who has
Alongside the work on the IS/AS/Push APIs, there has also been a massive attempt to plug all the spec omissions in the Client Server API. Historically the CS API releases have missed some of the newer APIs (and of course always miss the ones which postdate a given release), but we've released the APIs which /have/ been specified as stable in order to declare them stable. However, in this release we've tried to go through and fill in as many remaining gaps as possible.
The result is the release of Client Server API version 0.4. This is a huge update - increasing the size of the CS API by ~40%. The biggest new stuff includes fully formalising support for end-to-end encryption (thanks to Zil0!), versioning for rooms (so we can upgrade rooms to new versions of the protocol), synchronised read markers, user directories, server ACLs, MSISDN 3rd party ids, and .well-known server discovery (not that it's widely used yet), but for the full picture, best bet is to look at the changelog (now managed by towncrier!). It's probably fair to say that the CS API is growing alarmingly large at this point - Chrome says that it'd be 223 A4 pages if printed. Our solution to this will be to refactor it somehow (and perhaps switch to a more compact representation of the contents).
Some things got deliberately missed from the CS 0.4 release: particularly membership Lazy Loading (because we're still testing it out and haven't released it properly in the wild yet), the various GDPR-specific APIs (because they may evolve a bit as we refine them since the original launch), finalising ID grammars in the overall spec (because this is surprisingly hard and subtle and we don't want to rush it) and finally Communities (aka Groups), as they are still somewhat in flux.
Meanwhile, on the Server to Server API, there has also been a massive amount of work. Since the beginning of July it's
tripled in size as we've filled in the gaps, over the course of >200 commits (>150 of which from Travis). If you take a look at the current snapshot it's pretty unrecognisable from the historical draft; with the main changes being:The main stuff we still have remaining on the Server/Server API at this point is:
In terms of visualising progress on this spec mission it's interesting to look at the rate at which we've been closing PRs: this graph shows the total number of PRs which are in state ‘open' or ‘closed' on any given day:
...which clearly shows the original sprint to get the r0 of the CS API out the door at the end 2015, and then a more leisurely pace until the beginning of July 2018 since which the pace has picked up massively. Other ways of looking at include the number of open issues...
Meanwhile, Matrix 1.0 gets ever closer. With (almost) all this spec mission done, our plan is to focus more on improving the reference implementations - particularly performance in Synapse, UX in matrix-{'{'}react,ios,android{'}'}-sdk as used by Riot (especially for E2E encryption), and then declare a 1.0 and get back to implementing new features (particularly Editable Messages and Reactions) at last.
We'd like to thank everyone for your patience whilst we've been playing catch up on the spec, and hope you agree it's been worth the effort :)
Matthew & the core spec team.