We are back from Kamailio World, where we presented and participated in James Body's "Dangerous Demos". We were racing against the deadline, but managed to join the demos at the very last minute - and even win the award for "Most Entertaining Demo"!
It was great to catch up with old acquaintances - and meet many new ones! There were only around 150 people at Kamailio World, but given the area of expertise is very specialised, you can pretty much start talking to anyone and have a really interesting conversation.
A video from the dangerous demo event is available here:
The Parrot Drone we use in the demo has a 14 megapixel fisheye camera with advanced stabilization techniques which means that you can't actually see what happened when everybody went "ooh" - I assure you the "flip" command does exactly what you would expect!
Thanks to everybody who talked to us at Kamailio - and as always, come find us in the #matrix:matrix.org room on Matrix!
We have pushed out a new release of both Synapse, our reference server implementation, and matrix-angular-sdk, our reference webclient implementation!
The major new feature in Synapse is that you can now run Synapse backed by a PostgreSQL database. This increases performance and allows Synapse to scale much better! This, as well as various performance related bug fixes, should make things much snappier than before. Of course, you can still run SQLite; it's up to you what you want to use.
In the webclient you can now change or reset your password - we have had this feature requested a few times (although honestly I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned even more - maybe people are just better than me at remembering/managing their passwords) so this should be a welcome addition! We also fixed a memory leak in Angular, so again expect better performance!
Finally, we have done some work on improving the Application Service API, making it more reliable and secure. Please see the upgrade notes as well as the full changelog below.
Changes in Synapse v0.9.0:
General:
Add support for using a PostgreSQL database instead of SQLite. See postgres.rst for details.
Add password change and reset APIs. See Registration in the spec.
Fix memory leak due to not releasing stale notifiers - SYN-339.
Fix race in caches that occasionally caused some presence updates to be dropped - SYN-369.
Check server name has not changed on restart.
Add a sample systemd unit file and a logger configuration in contrib/systemd. Contributed Ivan Shapovalov.
Federation:
Add key distribution mechanisms for fetching public keys of unavailable remote home servers. See Retrieving Server Keys in the spec.
Configuration:
Add support for multiple config files.
Add support for dictionaries in config files.
Remove support for specifying config options on the command line, except for:
--daemonize - Daemonize the home server.
--manhole - Turn on the twisted telnet manhole service on the given port.
--database-path - The path to a sqlite database to use.
--verbose - The verbosity level.
--log-file - File to log to.
--log-config - Python logging config file.
--enable-registration - Enable registration for new users.
Application services:
Reliably retry sending of events from Synapse to application services, as per Application Services spec.
Application services can no longer register via the /register API, instead their configuration should be saved to a file and listed in the synapse app_service_config_files config option. The AS configuration file has the same format as the old /register request. See application_services.rst for more information.
Changes in Matrix Angular SDK 0.6.6:
Features:
Add password change and reset feature using v2_alpha APIs.
Bug fixes:
Fix memory leak caused by not removing a watcher on the root scope.
Matrix.org is happy to be sponsoring and talking at the WebRTC Conference and Expo in Miami, Florida, 12-14 May. Both Amandine and Matthew will be there - please come have a chat by booth #22! This is one of the longest running WebRTC Events, and Matthew is delivering one of the keynotes of the conference on Wednesday 4:00-4:30pm in room K-07.
Matthew will also participate in the "Open Source Options for WebRTC Development" session in room D2-02 at 9:50am on Wednesday (full agenda here).
Finally, Matrix will also be part of the WebRTC World Demos in room X-07 sometime between 4:30 and 7:30pm on Wednesday. Expect a dangerous demo!
Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone who came to talk to us at SMR9 yesterday. SMR is a great way for developers looking for jobs and startups needing engineers to have a chat.
We had a very busy day with plenty of people interested in Matrix and eager to join the team. We received a lot of CVs and will get back to you - but in the meantime please check out our code and come say hi in the Matrix HQ room, using any of these Matrix clients!
If you missed SMR, or just generally is interested in working for Matrix.org - please feel free to send your CV to us - we need all kinds of developers, with skills ranging from backend and frontend to mobile development!
This week, Matrix is visiting San Francisco for Fluent, a web development conference over three days, with events ranging from 2-day training sessions to 10-min showcase presentations.
I had the opportunity to participate in the latter: Tuesday's Solutions Showcase in the Community Lounge. The presentation was recorded, here is the video and slides.
I also had a 30-min in-depth talk earlier today, where I went through a case study of adding Matrix to your existing app (slides). After evaluating options, we decided to use the flux-chat example by Facebook - it's a basic chat application that uses their internal message dispatcher and showcases how a React/Flux app works.
The code for the original example can be found here, and the complete diff of changes necessary to integrate it with Matrix - using the matrix-js-sdk - can be found here (thanks to Matthew for yet another late-night hack!). I think it's very cool to see how easily their chat example can be turned into a Matrix client, albeit a fairly basic one! Here is an online version if you want to try it out!
The original flux-chat and the Matrix-enabled flux-chat
If you have any questions or comments, we are still at Fluent - you can catch us in the exhibition hall in booth #208 - or virtually, as always, in #matrix:matrix.org!
Matrix had a speaker slot in both events; the first talk was "Proposing an open interoperable signalling layer for WebRTC" (slides).
As I was talking to people in the tea-breaks between sessions, I was actually surprised at the amount of people who not only knew about Matrix, but who had been following eagerly since the early days, and had questions about specific features and recent developments!
Later in the day it was time for the Kranky Geek, and the talk then was a bit more technical: "Interoperable HTTP Signalling with Matrix" (slides). The talk included a "dangerous demo" where we made a WebRTC call from our Matrix iOS App to our webclient for the first time - thanks to the OpenWebRTC team for helping us make the demo!
What's great about these kind of events is the feedback and discussion following talks; lots of people have relevant experiences and opinions that they are happy to share, and of course questions on how exactly different features actually work.
It's always great to meet new people and have lots of various discussions. Hopefully we have got a few more people interested in Matrix - we have already seen some new joiners in the #matrix:matrix.org room!
Next up is Fluent in San Francisco next week, where I will be speaking.
Both the recording equipment and the video team volunteers were new this year, so some problems were encountered, which means that our lightning talk video unfortunately was lost. However, our talk in the IoT-devroom is now available:
Heads up that we released Synapse 0.8.1 a little while back, but we've all been too busy writing software to announce it... you know how it goes. Anyway, here are the changes:
Disable registration by default. New users can be added using the included register_new_matrix_user script or by enabling registration in the config.
Add metrics to synapse. To enable metrics use config options enable_metrics and metrics_port.
Fix bug where banning only kicked the user.
Note that first one in particular: if you set up a new install, you won't be able to register new users using the API by default. This means random people on the Internet can't create accounts on your Home Server unless you actually choose to let them. Also, if you were trying to ban users and noticed that didn't work... yeah, we fixed that.
Last week, we mentioned that we released part of a first implementation of the long awaited Application Service (AS) API as part of the 0.7.1 release. The AS API makes it dead simple to connect your service into the Matrix ecosystem using an existing standard Matrix server.
And today we're very excited that the first implementation using this API has gone live! OpenMarket just announced the OpenMarket Matrix Gateway which lets you chat with non-Matrix users via their phone number: as you send and receive instant messages from your Matrix chat room, they'll receive and send SMSes back to you, which will appear in your Matrix room as IM, extending your reach to any non-Matrix user.
To use the new OpenMarket service just login to the matrix.org webclient and start a chat with your target mobile phone user by identifying him/her with a Matrix ID in the format @+<msisdn>:matrix.openmarket.com (msisdn being the internationally formatted phone number of your contact) - any messages to them will be sent via OpenMarket's SMS service. The SMSes will be sent from dynamically assigned numbers so that the recipient is able to respond to your message(s) - and the user will first receive an "opt-in" message from the OpenMarket Matrix Gateway to invite them to the conversation (just as they would if you invited them to a conversation in Matrix). Note that there are a finite set of these dynamically assigned numbers: OpenMarket reserves the right to recycle contact numbers if they have not been used to send or receive traffic for more than 2 months.
Sending SMS through the OpenMarket Matrix Gateway will be free during the introductory beta testing period, and users will be warned when that changes - although usage is subject to a per-user fair-usage policy. Despite the free service today, you'll have to associate a valid PayPal account to your account in order to send messages for security purposes. OpenMarket will not (and cannot) charge this account without your consent. You can associate your PayPal account via the settings page of any reference Matrix web client which has been configured to be aware of the OpenMarket Matrix Gateway - for example, the matrix.org webclient.
You'll also have to accept the OpenMarket Matrix API End User License Agreement to use the service.
The OpenMarket Matrix Gateway is a great example of how the Application Service API can be used to extend Matrix, we're really happy to see it live and hope it's going to give our community lots of ideas! There are a lot of services that could mutually benefit from being integrated with Matrix, and the AS API makes this much easier to accomplish!
Thus, we strongly urge you to have a look at the AS API - and as always we are happy to answer any questions at #matrix:matrix.org!
We released Synapse 0.7.1 this morning - This release includes more critical federation stability and performance updates - please upgrade as soon as you can!. You can get the code and installation instructions from http://github.com/matrix-org/synapse as normal.
Other than the federation improvements, the big new feature that lands here is the long-awaited Application Service API. This is a set of simple extensions to the Client-Server API to make it much easier to build powerful gateways and other application logic on top of Matrix. You can think of it being somewhere between IRC Services, IMS application services and XMPP components - but with the simplicity of an IRC bot. The extensions let you register application services as privileged Matrix clients, and create virtual users and virtual rooms in bulk within Matrix (e.g. bridging an entire IRC network into Matrix). The API also lets your application service receive inbound events as HTTP pushes rather than having to poll. The end result is that it's suddenly become a lot easier to bridge existing communities with Matrix!
