I have just released v2 of jsonwebtoken and thought a blog post would be a good way to talk about the progress of jsonwebtoken, Tera and Gutenberg this month.

jsonwebtoken🔗

Version 2 is almost a full rewrite, but trying to keep the UX as good as possible.

The following improvements have been made:

• use serde instead of rustc_serialize: no brainer as serde is now usable on stable and reached 1.0.0
• RSA signing and verification
• Validation

Validation is the main thing that was missing from version 1 and brings jsonwebtoken to almost parity with libraries in other languages. It is detailed in the README.

As an aside, the signature of decode is an example of why I would like to have default arguments in functions. The signature is:

pub fn decode<T: DeserializeOwned>(
    token: &str,
    key: &[u8],
    validation: &Validation
) -> Result<TokenData<T>>

But I expect Validation to be the default most of the time so the ideal signature would be something like:

pub fn decode<T: DeserializeOwned>(
    token: &str,
    key: &[u8],
    validation = &Validation::default() // or whatever the syntax would be
) -> Result<TokenData<T>>

And using decode would be cleaner (at least for me):

decode(&token, "key", &Validation::default());
// VS
decode(&token, "key");

There is a pre RFC but not much progress has been made recently.

Thanks a lot to Mike Engel for all the feedback!

Tera🔗

Tera is a template engine based on Jinja2/Django templates

Tera has gone through 2 versions in April: 0.9.0 and now 0.10.

0.9 fixed a major bug on Windows and 0.10 updated serde to 1.0, no major changes otherwise: Tera is pretty stable now.

Gutenberg🔗

Gutenberg is a static site engine

Lots of progress this month on Gutenberg!

A short list of the biggest new features:

• Shortcodes inspired by Hugo
• Relative links to your own content: [my last article](./posts/an-article.md)
• Anchors for titles with an option to insert some HTML to allow behaviour similar to the Github READMEs
• Works on Windows!

Next up is sorting by weight/order and finishing up pagination.

Once those features are in, I will probably spend some time making an actual documentation site to ensure it works for sites more complex than this blog.

If anyone is knowledgeable about Live Reload, I'd like some help tracking down this issue.

Solving this issue in Syntect would also help but I don't have time/motivation for it myself right now.

Otherwise, Gutenberg mostly needs feedback and even feature request for things I didn't consider yet.