This Week in Ruma

From the editor

In addition to the changes to ruma enumerated below, there was some great progress on the future user-facing documentation for Ruma. My partner, who works as a technical writer, helped me brainstorm and outline what information people would need to understand Matrix and Ruma, how to get a copy of Ruma, configure it, and deploy it. As always, needing to explain something simply to someone else forces you to understand it at a deeper level yourself. I think the project is going to benefit greatly from some longer form explanations of of the what, why, and how of Matrix that aren't targeted at technical people.

Notable changes to ruma

• Usage of the try! macro has been converted to using the new question mark syntax.

  Use of this unstable feature is one nice benefit of Ruma targeting nightly Rust.

• Added support for authentication with an access token.

  This is the mechanism which almost all endpoints that require authentication use.

• Added the /logout endpoint which revokes all access tokens associated with the user.

• Added the /account/password endpoint which lets the user change their account password.

  This endpoint uses both user-interactive authentication and access token authentication. The reasons for this were not clear to me, so I discussed it in #matrix-dev:matrix.org, and was able to distill the results of the discussion into SPEC-407.

• Moved and renamed various free functions into static methods on the types that they manipulate.

• Filled in some missing API documentation and added the #![deny(missing_docs)] attribute to make sure docs are added as new items are.

Matrix at large

This week there was a story posted to Hacker News about how Google failed to recognize the value of Gchat, which resulted in the usual discussion of chat services that exist today. I left a comment encouraging people to look at Matrix, and it generated a good amount of discussion and publicity for the project. Be sure to read the thread!