Mozdev.org

The bulk of my last two weeks has been spent at either OSCON or the Mozilla Summit. Both were great events for me, allowing me to meet the Mozdev crew for the first time as well as many other important people in the Mozilla community.

Despite the busy conference schedule, some regular tasks were worked on:

• Moved project adoption request for surfkeys forward
• Backend work for pending projects
• Fixed bug that caused unreleased files to not be removed from update.rdf
• Fixed bug caused by fixing bug#19636 (above) that broke updating download files

We came out with a bunch of ideas for Mozdev developers and tasks for us to do:

• Extension setup wizard using Mark Finkle's FizzyPop - this could do cool things like get a ready-to-use extension template setup in a project's VCS as well as tag the project with the selected applications automatically.
• Extension packager to automate creating a .xpi file and uploading it to a project's downloads folder
• A new localization tool to help developers get their extensions ported to more locales
• Look into adding XPIDiff and other automated testing suites to Mozdev to help developers test their extensions before pushing to AMO and make reviewer's job easier (and hopefully get items through the queue faster).
• Look into OpenGrok support in addition to or instead of MXR
• Work with Matt Zeier to move our hardware to achieve better uptime and have more breathing room for future expandability.
• Work with AMO developers on how remora's API can be improved for tighter integration with Mozdev (submitting extensions from Mozdev to AMO, integrating feedback from Mozdev into AMO review process to improve karma).

Our discussion on what Mozdev can do for the dev community at the Summit had a good discussion as did our BoF session at OSCON (notes).

I've been able to do some digesting of the past couple weeks so I plan to get back to development this week focusing on project creation automation.

The Birds of a Feather (BOF) session had a good turn-out; about 25 people. There was a good mix of existing and potential extension developers in attendance, including people from Mozilla, ActiveState, Songbird, and Nokia.

The topics covered included:

• Tools. Primarily IDEs e.g., Komodo, Eclipse. The lack of better an end-to-end tooling solution, for example a drag-and-drop form editor like Visual Studio was discussed, but not necessarily seen as the main barrier of entry to extension development.
• Addon libraries. JQuery, Dojo, FUEL, and STEEL are deemed as being helpful. Some are more mature than others. Some, like JQuery, have chrome integration issues such as polluting the global namespace. Some developers have overcome these issues. Less exposure to XPCOM interfaces for common tasks speeds development time. Using web-targeted libraries have helped developers perform things not common in extensions, such as animations.
• Documentation. In general, documentation has gotten better. Some people are comfortable with tools like MXR while others hadn't heard of it. It was mentioned that Mozdev is going to add MXR as one of its services for project owners.
• Debug tools. Some useful tools were identified such as DOM Inspector, XPCOM Viewer, Firebug and Venkman. A "Firebug for Chrome" was labeled the holy grail as existing tools are broken or don't go far enough.
• Hosting, deployment, and updates. Mozdev plans to work with AMO to make it easier to deploy to AMO, expose AMO stats to mozdev, and to share other data such as ratings. This doesn't solve the "review queue" problem. One possible solution discussed was to add multiple channels to the Addons Manager. This would allow users to choose experimental channels, such as Mozdev, from which to install and update addons. We also discussed hosting an expanded version of Ted Mielczarek's Extension Wizard on Mozdev with support for more target applications.

Some other topics were discussed and an hour seemed too little time in the end. The community is engaged heavily in add-on development and are interested in finding solutions to the common pain points. Mozdev was identified as a crucial resource for developers to carry out these tasks.

Come support mozdev at OSCON 2008. We want to hear your ideas and meet fellow mozilla folks. Our schedule:

Wednesday 7/23
7:30pm
Location: D137
BOF Tools and Other Resources for Mozilla Extension Development
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/4645

Thursday 7/24
10:45am
Location : Portland 252
State of Lightning Talks
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/2236

Hope to see you there!

Well, if the Songbird folks can do it, so can we!

Mozdev will be at OSCON this year from Weds 23 to Fri 26 July. Representing are David Boswell, Doug Warner, Eric Jung, Myk Melez, Nigel Howard, and Brian King. We are partly sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation, and would like to express great appreciation for that.

What will we be doing there?
- Leading a BOF session on extension development, at 19:30 on Wednesday, the 23rd.
- Giving a "State Of" Lightning talk with other non-profit organisations.
- Having a Mozdev board meeting, the first ever in person.
- Volunteering at the Mozilla booth.

We hope to see current Mozdev project owners and site users there, but also would like to get new people on board. The Mozdev mission fits nicely into the OSCON ethos, and meeting people from other communities will be beneficial.