iOS: Welcome to MatrixKit

by Emmanuel Rohee | Apr 24, 2015 | Tech, Tutorials | 0 comments

Historically we’ve had two projects for iOS:

• MatrixSDK: a low level library to interact with a Matrix homeserver
• Console: an example Matrix client based on MatrixSDK

The primary intention of Console was to demonstrate how to use MatrixSDK to write a Matrix client app.
However, this split isn’t helpful for developers who want higher level modules that provides UIViewControllers ready to use in an existing app, with no need to manage low level communications with the Matrix homeserver.

It is where the MatrixKit project started. MatrixKit sits between MatrixSDK and your existing iOS app.

It provides customisable UIViewControllers a developer can integrate in their app.  If you want to add to your app a screen to chat in a room, you just need to use the MXKRoomViewController.

We made MatrixKit so that the components it provides are easy to integrate but also easy to customise. We do not have yet full samples of customisation as we’ve been focused on the library core, but here are a few examples:

  

You probably recognise the theme of the first one, as it’s what we use in the Console app today.
The second one is the iOS7-style look and feel from JSQMessagesViewController. With few lines of code we connected it to MatrixKit data models. Yes, data models provided by MatrixKit are reusable too.

MatrixKit is also highly extensible. If you want to create new table cells to render messages, new views, new view controllers, etc, you will find a place to hook them into the MatrixKit code.

MatrixKit repository is here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-kit and it is available via CocoaPods (the MatrixKit pod).

In parallel of MatrixKit, we did some spring-cleaning – the official Matrix.org iOS offerings are now split into three github repos. One for each deliverable:

• https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk
• https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-kit
• https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-console

Other releases:

Today, we released MatrixSDK 0.4.0 (changes). Update your pods :)

Console 0.4.0 (changes) is in the Apple submission process. This will be the first version of the app using MatrixKit. Aesthetically, there is no change since the previous version. The app is more stable due to all the data abstractions and management improvements provided by MatrixKit.

If you’re an iOS developer, please have a go with MatrixKit and let us know on #ios:matrix.org how you get on!

Monitoring Synapse Metrics with Prometheus

by Matthew Hodgson | Apr 23, 2015 | Tech, Tutorials | 1 comment

Synapse has had support for exporting a comprehensive range of metrics via HTTP since 0.8.1 – we added this to help quantify the benefits of all the performance work which is going on currently in advance of Synapse 0.9. If you’re interested in monitoring your own synapse and seeing what’s going on using something like Prometheus, Leo just wrote a quick tutorial on getting up and running:

How to monitor Synapse metrics using Prometheus

1: Install prometheus:

Follow instructions at http://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/install/

2: Enable synapse metrics:

Simply setting a (local) port number will enable it. Pick a port. prometheus itself defaults to 9090, so starting just above that for locally monitored services seems reasonable. E.g. 9092:

Add to homeserver.yaml

metrics_port: 9092

Restart synapse

3: Check out synapse-prometheus-config

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-prometheus-config

4: Add synapse.html and synapse.rules

The .html file needs to appear in prometheus’s consoles directory, and the .rules file needs to be invoked somewhere in the main config file. A symlink to each from the git checkout into the prometheus directory might be easiest to ensure git pull keeps it updated.

5: Add a prometheus target for synapse

This is easiest if prometheus runs on the same machine as synapse, as it can then just use localhost:

global: {
  rule_file: "synapse.rules"
}

job: {
  name: "synapse"

  target_group: {
    target: "http://localhost:9092/"
  }
}

6: Start prometheus:

./prometheus -config.file=prometheus.conf

7: Wait a few seconds for it to start and perform the first scrape,

then visit the console:

http://server-where-prometheus-runs:9090/consoles/synapse.html

And the end result looks something like…

…amongst many many other system & application metrics.

You can grab the latest version of the tutorial at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/develop/docs/metrics-howto.rst – thanks to Leo for writing it up. Any questions, let us know!