Hacker News Reader

Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

You may find happiness with matrix (https://matrix.org/). It's basically a "message synchronization protocol" done with today's technology (HTTP+JSON). The synchronization approach versus the messages being sent on the socket actually makes me think about mosh vs ssh.

View on HN

Thanks for the suggestion. I skimmed their docs before briefly; I'm giving it a second look now, and realizing I passed by way too quickly last time.

It looks like they did tackle acausality head-on; I like what I see about previous message IDs being included in https://matrix.org/docs/spec/#pdus

Nervous about ever christening JSON "today's technology". JSON has the same problem XML in XMPP does: can't tunnel binary e.g. video without extreme backbending (jingle for XMPP is pretty much a textbook example of "too much friction -> not fit for purpose and near zero adoption"). But it looks like matrix is pluggable on transports, too, so that's potentially a sweet spot for lazy REST clients and powerful performance situations to coexist.

... And I popped into their self-hosted chat room. Observation 1: It works (!). Observation 2: the devs are dogfooding and seem both knowledgeable and friendly :) I haven't taken the leap to self-host yet (will later!); but from preliminaries, matrix is looking remarkably solid and well thought out. I'm going to try to build something with this! Thanks again for the link!

> Nervous about ever christening JSON "today's technology".

I use this to say "XML was the hot when XMPP was created, the way JSON is the hot today, when Matrix is created". I 100% agree with you that using a non-binary-friendly format sucks for pretty much anything that goes beyond plain text messaging:

- encryption

- files/emoticons/voice

- on the server side, any routing stuff

But still, like XMPP I hope this will not be enough to hamper its development.

> jingle for XMPP is pretty much a textbook example of "too much friction -> not fit for purpose and near zero adoption"

Amen to that. XMPP is basically an entity-to-entity messaging protocol, and yet because it can't handle binary there needs to be a negotiation step and yet another connection for binary stuff... blah.

The client-server API of Matrix only uses http+json as the lowest common denominator baseline for compatibility. Folks are more than welcome to implement custom more efficient transports like COAP/CBOR or whatever.

The server-server API is currently just targetting https+json just for expedience in getting started, but nothing to stop us negotiating more efficient transports in future - capn proto has come up a lot in conversation as a possible option. Handling signing is a bit more fun as we currently rely on signing canonical json, but surmountable.

As for binary transfers... well, random blobs are just handled as pure HTTP with a mimetype currently :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com