From the editor
It's been more than a year since the last This Week in Ruma.
The project has been mostly on hiatus while waiting for revisions to the Matrix spec and maturity of the Rust ecosystem.
Ruma is not dead, however, and small improvements have continued over the last year.
The Matrix spec has advanced quite a bit and many of the blocking issues for Ruma have been resolved.
Rust's maturity is another story.
async/await is still under development and this is the most significant blocking issue to progress on Ruma.
For a longer analysis of why we're waiting, this reddit comment puts it very well.
The main announcement to make at this point is that there is now a crates.io release of ruma-client, the high-level client library most developers will use to build Matrix-enabled software.
Thank you to all the new contributors since the last This Week in Ruma, and for everyone who has continued to show interest in the project despite the lull in development.
New contributors
From the editor
It's been several months since the last This Week in Ruma.
There has been some work on Ruma during this time, but development has largely been on hiatus while we wait for the dust to settle on two things:
- Stabilization and release of hyper 0.11 (the tokio-based async rewrite).
- A new version of the Matrix specification that includes the many changes since the current version.
The former has been in the "nearly done" state for a while now, so we've been doing a bit of development against hyper's master branch.
As far as I know, no significant API changes are expected at this point.
The latter has been delayed significantly because the Matrix team has been up to their eyeballs in work on Riot, particularly in squashing issues with end-to-end encryption as they try to move it out of beta.
While we would like a new spec to help in moving Ruma forward, the Matrix team has our full support on their current priorities, as fully working encryption for messages is simply way more important for the world right now.
A change in the Ruma project worth noting is that I've decided to end my policy of "no new unstable features," effectively deprioritizing moving Ruma's crates to stable Rust.
The simple reaosn for this is that there are still unstable features that change what the ideal API for some of our crates would be.
Having the best possible API should take priority over which version of Rust is required, especially with how easy it is to install Rust with rustup.
Personally, I've been more focused on the client-side libraries recently.
The past week I've made a lot of progress on finalizing and implementing the API for ruma-api, ruma-client-api, and ruma-client.
In the last update back in February, I mentioned working on a custom derive to make the implementation of Matrix APIs easier.
That has evolved into a full Macros 2.0 procedural macro that offers a very succinct, declarative API that will make the client libraries much simpler.
This work is still very much in progress, but having finally figured out an approach for this is a big milestone in having a usable Matrix client library for Rust.
We're excited to see what Rust developers build with it when it's ready.
Notable changes to ruma
- Added the
/rooms/:room_id/kick API endpoint.
- Added initial implementation for the room states in the
/sync API endpoint.
- Corrected the structure of authentication parameters in login requests.
- Fixed the behavior of the
next_batch token when there are no new events for the /sync API endpoint.
- Added basic implementation for the pushers API endpoint.
- Return empty JSON objects as the default response for Riot compatibility.
Notable changes to ruma-api
- Revised the API into a simpler form that specifies conversions between hyper's types and its own.
- Published versions 0.10.0 and then 0.11.0 with small changes, most notably updating to serde 1.0.
- Published versions 0.7.0 and then 0.8.0 with small changes, most notably updating to serde 1.0.
New contributors
Call for participation
Interested in getting involved with Ruma?
Here are some good places to start:
Previously featured and still available:
There are also plenty of API endpoints that still need to be implemented.
Check the status document for a list.
From the editor
Progress on ruma-api and ruma-client-api, converting ruma-client-api over to the new approach ruma-api is using.
After converting several of the modules using macros, I decided to take another stab at using a macros 1.1 procedural macro for automatically implementing the details of each request and response type.
The result is the new ruma-api-derive.
So far it handles only a couple of simple variations, but with some of the groundwork laid, it should be easier now to fill out the remaining functionality.
The result will be that ruma-client-api will be completely declarative, and won't have to resort to manual trait implementation for a few odd cases that didn't fit the pattern of the "macros by example" macros.
Notable changes to ruma
- Updated Diesel to the 0.11 series.
- Published version 0.9.0, which updates Diesel to the 0.11 series.
- Published version 0.6.0, which updates ruma-identifiers to the 0.9 series.
Call for participation
Interested in getting involved with Ruma?
Here are some good places to start:
Previously featured and still available:
There are also plenty of API endpoints that still need to be implemented.
Check the status document for a list.
From the editor
Progress on the Ruma homeserver has slowed a bit while we wait for the next version of the Matrix specification to be published.
There have been some significant changes to Synapse (the reference implementation homeserver) and Riot (the flagship Matrix client) that are not yet reflected in the spec, and as such, releasing an initial version of Ruma would not be of much value since it could have significant breakage with Riot.
Progress on ruma-api, ruma-client-api, and ruma-client continues, however.
We're pushing ahead on one of the new API designs (codenamed "Ralith" after the community member of the same name, whose ideas it is based on) and it's working well so far.
You can see the in-progress changes to ruma-api, the in-progress changes to ruma-client-api, and the in-progress changes to ruma-client that we're using to test out this new design.
Further review and comments on these changes are welcome!
Notable changes to ruma
- Added support for transaction IDs for event creation.
- Added the
GET /rooms/:room_id/state endpoint.
- Updated to the Macros 1.1 version of code generation crates.
- Updated Serde to the 0.9 series and Diesel to the 0.10 series.
- Added a version number field to Ruma's configuration to allow for future changes to the schema.
- Changed the behavior of the deprecated
/tokenrefresh endpoint to match the behavior of Synapse.
- Published version 0.8.1, which adds missing Diesel trait implementations needed for the homeserver.
New contributors
Call for participation
Interested in getting involved with Ruma?
Here are some good places to start:
Previously featured and still available:
There are also plenty of API endpoints that still need to be implemented.
Check the status document for a list.
From the editor
With the recent death of my friend Tamara, and moving to a new home, I haven't been able to give Ruma the attention I would've liked in the last few weeks.
The rest of the Ruma community is still helping to push things forward, and I thank them sincerely for that.
In particular, I have shared commit access to the master branch of most Ruma repositories with top contributors mujx and farodin91, both in recognition of their continued contributions to the project, the trust I have in them now, and my desire to grow the community and not be a blocker for progress on the project when I'm unavailable.
Congratulations and thank you to both of them!
We've had a lot of discussion over a major overhaul to the design of ruma-api.
The discussion began when Simon Goller proposed some code for the first significant endpoint in ruma-client.
It then continued in the Ruma room on Matrix, a reddit post, and a series of issues and pull requests against ruma-api:
Right now we are leaning towards that last one being the one we choose, but we still want to try implementing some of ruma-client-api and ruma-client against it to see how well it works.
Feedback and participation in the discussion is most welcome!
Notable changes to ruma
- Added initial support for user presence.
- ruma's config file can now be indicated with an option to the CLI.
- Published version 0.4.0, 0.4.1, and 0.5.0 to crates.io.
- Updated serde to 0.9.
- Published version 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 to crates.io.
- Updated serde to 0.9, regex to 0.2, and url to 1.4.
- Updated diesel to 0.10, though this seems to have caused a regression, and will be fixed soon.
New contributors
Call for participation
Interested in getting involved with Ruma?
Here are some good places to start:
Previously featured and still available:
There are also plenty of API endpoints that still need to be implemented.
Check the status document for a list.