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!

This week, Matthew and myself went to the WebRTC conference and its related Kranky Geek event in sunny London.

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.

Earlier this year we went to FOSDEM - as reported in an earlier blog post.

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:

(Click here to download the video)

The slides are also available. You can check out the slides from the lightning talk as well.

As always, questions and comments are very welcome in the #matrix:matrix.org room!

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.

Okay, back to writing software again!

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!

Hi all,

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.

Update: You can also install and run Synapse now via Docker, thanks to a Dockerfile at https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/silviof/docker-matrix/ contributed today by Silvio Fricke. Thanks Silvio!!

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!

We'll post another blog post shortly to give a lot more information; in the interim you can read more about it in the newly updated spec at http://matrix.org/docs/spec/#application-service-api.

Changes in synapse v0.7.1 (2015-02-19)
======================================


Initial alpha implementation of parts of the Application Services API.
Including:

AS Registration / Unregistration
User Query API
Room Alias Query API
Push transport for receiving events.
User/Alias namespace admin control



Add cache when fetching events from remote servers to stop repeatedly
fetching events with bad signatures.


Respect the per remote server retry scheme when fetching both events and
server keys to reduce the number of times we send requests to dead servers.


Inform remote servers when the local server fails to handle a received event.


Turn off python bytecode generation due to problems experienced when
upgrading from previous versions.

Some updates on the conferences Matrix attended over the last 3 weeks: WebRTC Summit in Santa Clara, TAD Summit in Istanbul, WebRTC World West in San José and fOSSa in Rennes. Great shows, ending in lots of interesting discussions and new excitement in Matrix!

🔗WebRTC Summit (Santa Clara, November 4-6)

Matrix was a sponsor at the Santa Clara WebRTC Summit at CloudExpo, and opened the WebRTC track alongside our friends at Open Peer / Hookflash. Matthew presented Matrix as the missing signalling layer for WebRTC and as a good federated complement to MQTT and COAP for IoT use cases: you can find his presentation here.

Great techie discussions and debates down there, the stand was flooded with interested people and John had a hardtime answering everyone by himself on day 2!

But he still found a few minutes to do a TV interview for SYSCon TV on Tuesday evening! :)

[embed]http://youtu.be/JVq6S9V1Jcg[/embed]

🔗TAD Summit (Istanbul, November 12-13)

Matrix was a partner at TAD Summit in Istanbul this year, a great opportunity to meet a very good mix of developers, industry players and mobile networks! TAD mixes conferences and technical workshops where everyone gets involved to create a vibrant ecosystem for Telecom Application Developers. Again really productive discussions and meetings as we continue our search for partners to help support the uptake of Matrix.

Matthew's talk was fully recorded so just watch the video to get the real pitch!

[embed]http://youtu.be/ER3g4-4bFYk?list=PLO-gJ4-4x_IIYVTuLmVr8iUedvVdduYY4[/embed]

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As-5vVdXhu0[/embed]

🔗WebRTC World (San Jose, November 18-20)

Matrix's attendance at WebRTC World in San Jose was more rewarding than expected! The team was ready to be part of the expo and give a talk on FOSS WebRTC options... but didn't hesitate to jump at the opportunity when a demo slot opened up! And that was a worthwhile decision as Matrix ended up winning not one but TWO awards from the demo: The Audience Choice Award as the audience's favourite demo of the 10 shown on Tuesday, and also the overall Best Social Integration Award from the Jury! So a big congrats to the dev team who were rushing to get the fine details ready in time and to Matthew for getting the audience's attention! And of course a even bigger thank you to everyone who voted for us, including in the Jury!

Of course this drew lots of interest, and WebRTC Expo ended up the busiest show ever for the team who pitched solidly at the booth for 2 days in a row!

🔗fOSSa (Rennes, November 20)

And eventually, while Matthew and John were celebrating in San José (or flying home, more accurately), Amandine was also evangelising at home in Rennes (France), where fOSSa was gathering experts from the opensource world for 3 days. Matrix was presented within the Serendipity section on the conférence, "Le Carrefour des Possibles": 6 minutes to pitch an open project that making dreams possible.

So if you speak French or are not afraid to only read from the slides, check out the video the team made of the pitch. The official one should be available soon!

[embed]http://youtu.be/DyL9Ue0KlBU[/embed]

Crazy session tonight at 5pm UK time (12 Noon Eastern Time; 9AM Pacific) on VUC as Matrix, Truphone and Jitsi were crazy enough to hack a federated demo in 48h!

Join us live for the demo from the inside by using Matrix to attend the conference (see steps below)! No browser supporting WebRTC at hand but still willing to play with Matrix? You can also follow the chatroom (bridged to IRC) by entering #vuc:matrix.org.

For other connection means:

• Live video http://live.vuc.me or http://vuc.me
• Live audio: http://vuc.audio
• sip:[email protected]
• Skype:vuc.me
• Or from a regular telephone or cell call ZipDX (+1 (646) 475-2098) or see the Voxbone International Dial-in List.

Steps to join the call from Matrix:

1. Register on Matrix from Chrome if not already done :)
2. Start a chat with @vucbot:matrix.org by entering the ID in the appropriate textfield at the bottom of the public rooms list on http://matrix.org/beta and click on "Message User"
3. In the chat room start a voice call by clicking on the mic icon in the top right corner. Don't forget to allow your browser to access your mic and speakerphones!

Hi all,

There's been loads of work going on in various branches on Synapse (federation_authorization and event_signing) as we land the final features needed for Synapse to be used in production as a Matrix reference server.  Meanwhile the iOS demo client and SDK has been coming on leaps and bounds too over at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk.

However, stuff has also been happening on the main Synapse development branch too, and we've just released 0.4.2 onto master for lots of various goodies - see release notes below.

Please upgrade your homeservers and play with the new client - the new JSON viewing/editing features are particularly useful and interesting for powerusers and developers!

Matthew

Changes in synapse 0.4.2 (2014-10-31)
=====================================

Homeserver:

 * Fix bugs where we did not notify users of correct presence updates.
 * Fix bug where we did not handle sub second event stream timeouts.

Webclient:

 * Add ability to click on messages to see JSON.
 * Add ability to redact messages.
 * Add ability to view and edit all room state JSON.
 * Handle incoming redactions.
 * Improve feedback on errors.
 * Fix bugs in mobile CSS.
 * Fix bugs with desktop notifications.

It's been an incredibly busy few weeks in Matrixland - we've had our heads down rushing to get new stuff ready for today's TechCrunch Disrupt London hackathon.

The big news is that we have our first alpha releases of native Mobile SDKs available today for Matrix for iOS & Android! These are entirely new projects - you can check out the SDKs and demo apps (which implement a basic Matrix chatroom client similar to the webclient demo at:

• http://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk
• http://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk

We still have a lot of polishing and lipstick to apply to these, but it should be a good starting point for folks who'd like to hack on mobile apps for Matrix! We haven't had a chance to generate appledoc/javadoc for these yet, but we'll post them on matrix.org shortly.

There's also been some work going into restructuring our documentation and finalising the spec - all Matrix generic documentation now lives in a new git project at http://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc. We're still working on wrapping all the details of the spec into a single canonical document, but it's getting there and should be locked down shortly.

Meanwhile, we're also pleased to announce the new Synapse 0.4 release series of the reference Matrix homeserver. Our focus on Synapse over the last few weeks has been on implementing the remaining pieces of the Matrix security model and getting the server to the point where folks can deploy it properly in production environments.

Synapse 0.4 deliberately breaks backwards compatibility on the server-server federation protocol, as we now cryptographically sign all federation traffic at the HTTP layer (using Authorization headers) in order to have a strong assertion to the identity of the servers which exchange traffic. We can't really use SSL client/server certificates for this as it's incompatible with Synapse deployments which are hosted behind generic SSL loadbalancers.

Meanwhile we have two other major development branches on Synapse which will land shortly - one of which cryptographically signs all events, thus preventing tampering with room history, and the other of which performs strict authorization on all traffic received through federation to avoid malicious events being injected and breaking the consistency of the distributed room. These should be landing shortly - at which point the full security model of Matrix will be implemented in Synapse and we can finally remove the "don't use this in production!" warnings!

API developers: be aware that this release also fixes the confusion over timestamps in the client-server (and server-server) API. Events now have only one well-defined timestamp - event.origin_server_ts; the localtime on the homeserver which first receives a message. This replaces the previous confusing event.ts and event.content.hsob_ts timestamps. This should be a trivial change to implement.

Finally, we've also had a detour into robotics to build our new mascot (Sentinel)... pictures forthcoming shortly!

Thanks for supporting Matrix - please let us know how you get on with the new releases at #matrix:matrix.org!

Changes in synapse 0.4.1 (2014-10-17) ===================================== Webclient:

• Fix bug with display of timestamps.

🔗Changes in synpase 0.4.0 (2014-10-17)

This release includes changes to the federation protocol and client-server API that is not backwards compatible.

The Matrix specification has been moved to a separate git repository: http://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc

You will also need an updated syutil and config. See UPGRADES.rst.

Homeserver:

• Sign federation transactions to assert strong identity over federation.
• Rename timestamp keys in PDUs and events from 'ts' and 'hsob_ts' to 'origin_server_ts'.