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.

FOSDEM was great fun! Two days full of conferences and demos; lots of interesting technologies and interested people - and most of all: talking to so many new faces about Matrix and potential uses and integration ideas.

Both our lightning talk and IoT-devroom talk were completely filled up with huge queues outside (sorry folks), and our demos seemed to go down fairly well. In fact several people set up their own homeserver and joined the federated network of Matrix servers during FOSDEM itself!

Here's a view from our stand, from our lightning talk and from our IoT-devroom talk.

If you missed the talks, recordings will (soon) be available from the FOSDEM site (links will be added here once available) - in the meantime you can check out the slides here: lightning talk and IoT-devroom talk.

Thanks to everyone who came to have a chat about Matrix and/or help with setting up their own homeserver (or to play with Sentinel, our mascot) - please do reach out to us via our Matrix HQ room or IRC (#matrix on freenode) if you have any problems - or want to help us fix our python packaging ;) Now is a great time to get involved as we are currently landing new APIs and soon will be offering an Application Server API to ease bridging to other services.

This weekend, Matrix is heading to FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) in Brussels, Belgium. We will be hosting two events: a lightning talk on Saturday at 16:30 in room H.2215 (Ferrer), and an IoT devroom talk on Sunday morning at 11:00 in room H.2213.

FOSDEM's schedule is looking very interesting and varied, and we hope we can learn about interesting projects - and of course show how and where Matrix can be used to lots of FOSDEM-attendees. Please come over and have a chat if you are interested; we have a stand on the second floor in the K building - just take a right after coming up the stairs and say hi!

We have also set up a Matrix <-> IRC bridge on the #fosdem channel on freenode, which means that any conversation happening there will be copied over to #fosdem:matrix.org - and vice versa. Making bridges to other services is currently being worked on as part of the Application Services API - we want to be able to connect different services together via Matrix.

Finally, we are always available in the official Matrix HQ room - please join and say hi!

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'.

Matrix.org is a team of around 10 developers working together on the Matrix project, defining the Matrix open standard and developing the opensource reference client and server implementations. Most of the team has day jobs at Amdocs or OpenMarket (who kindly sponsor us to work on Matrix), and we gladly welcome contributors from the wider open source community.

Matrix was started by Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape whilst building Amdocs Unified Communications, on realising that traditional VoIP and IM standards were insufficient to power featureful apps which can openly federate with one another. Matrix is designed to support open federation for the current and future state-of-the-art in communication apps using a simple web-friendly HTTP API standard. Our dream is to break down the walls between today's communication silos, and make VoIP and IM as ubiquitous and open as email.

🔗Matthew

Matthew Hodgson is technical co-founder of matrix.org, responsible for defining Matrix's vision with Amandine and moving obstacles out of the way of the team in order to build it. Matthew has spent the last 15 years mainly designing and building various communication solutions on top of an alarming array of different technologies (IRC, IM, NNTP, IMAP, IAX, SIP/RTP, RTMP, XMPP... and now Matrix).

Matthew's day job is running the Unified Communications team at Amdocs, creating communication apps for large mobile network operators (e.g. Blah for TIM Brasil). Previously he ran "The Next Generation" telephony/media team at MX Telecom (acquired by Amdocs in 2010), building a highly distributed SIP softswitch and mobile-optimised WebRTC-compatible graph-based media framework and VoIP stack to power MX's voice and video services. Matthew has also been known to dabble in sysadmin (running MX Telecom's sysadmin team), dubious graphic design and CGI, and wishes he had more time to play piano. He has a degree in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Cambridge, and has previously worked at Accenture, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, TheOneRing.net as well as misguidedly co-founding a digital marketing startup in Bahrain. [LinkedIn]

🔗Amandine

Amandine Le Pape is business co-founder of matrix.org, responsible for defining the Matrix vision with Matthew and then organising the non-technical activities required to support and promote it and make it successful.

Amandine has spent the last 2 years setting up and leading the Unified Communications line of business within Amdocs as a Product Manager, and has more than 10 years of experience in mobile services and telecommunications. She has a degree in telecommunications engineering from Ecole Supérieure de Chimie, Physique et Electronique de Lyon and an EMBA from ESC Rennes. [LinkedIn]

Hey,

We realized we're missing a high level overview highlighting the key points of the specifications and architecture of Matrix, which could be useful for those who don't feel like going straight into the specs. So here is a quick presentation to fill in some of the gaps!

Please fire away with any questions :)

Hi all,

We just pushed our first major update since matrix.org launched for Synapse, the reference Matrix homeserver:

🔗Changes in synapse 0.2.2 (2014-09-06)

Webclient:

• Fix desktop notifications
• Add support for captchas on registration
• Handle m.room.aliases events.
• Implement local echo when sending message
• Inform the UI when a message failed to send.
• Only autoscroll on receiving a new message if the user was already at the bottom of the screen.
• Add support for ban/kick reasons.
• Add /join support for IRC acolytes
• Make IRC-style commands a little more forgiving

Homeserver:

• Validate m.room.power_level events.
• When the server returns state events it now also includes the previous content if any to aid pagination
• Add support for inviting people when creating a new room.
• Make the homeserver inform the room via m.room.aliases when a new alias is added for a room.

The matrix.org homeserver & webclient has already been updated to the latest version - if you're running your own homeserver, please update. v0.2.2 retains backwards compatibility with previous homeserver releases.

Get the code from http://github.com/matrix-org/synapse!