Notes from DLSLUG 3-May-2007: Roger Trussell on Developing FireFox extensions

[Ted Roche]

(Thanks to Bill Sconce for studiously taking notes while I was distracted.)

Ten people attended the May meeting of the Dartmouth / Lake Sunapee
Linux User Group, held in Corson Hall Room 60, one floor up from our
usual haunts. (Thanks to Bill McGonigle for making that apparent in the
announcements!)

Lloyd Kvam took over the duties of Master of Ceremonies as Bill McG had
been called away. LLoyd welcomed us, reminded us that the DLSLUG Library
[1] was up to nearly 100 books, and gave me a few minites for
announcements (check the http://www.gnhlug.org site for upcoming events
and notes from past ones; let us know if you have an idea for a project
you'd like the group to work with you on.)

Roger did the main presentation, on FireFox extensions. Extensions are
different from plug-ins, which are intended to be used to play media
(Flash, MPEG, etc.) in the main windows. Extensions extend the
interface. Packaged as an .XPI ("zippy") file, they are a standard ZIP
containing a XML and text file manifests of the contents of a jar file.
The Jar file, in turn, contains XML, CSS, XUL (Mozilla's UI in XML
format), resources such as graphics, and code written in Javascript.
Roger showed us the various parts of the files and discussed how the
entire thing was assembled.

Roger recommended a couple of good resources for getting started with
Mozilla extensions:

http://kb.mozilaazine.org/Getting_started_with_extension_development
http://www.xulplanet.come
http://developer.mozilla.org

Notes and sample code coming, once he's cleaned it up a bit.

Thanks to Bill McGonigle for organizing and announcing, Lloyd for
running the show, Roger for his presentation and Bill Sconce for taking
good notes.

[1] http://www.dlslug.org/library.html

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com