Resources for Firefox Developers
I’m still fully engrossed in our Firefox development. I managed to turn our stuff into an installable extension today, so I should be able to start pushing pieces out onto this blog as soon as we work out the licensing issues.
I’ve said plenty about the potential of Firefox to transform the face of computing. One of prerequisites for this is to coddle software developers in the same way that Microsoft has learned to. Though I suppose the Linux crowd would sneer at this, I find MS Visual Studio to be jaw-droppingly impressive: a highly functional editor, great debugger, extensible architecture, etc. But then I’ve already laid my cards on the table with regard to turning Firefox into an IDE.
The other asset Microsoft provides to programmers is the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). This is an enormous library of knowledge base articles and code samples. I remember, in the early 90’s, how I used to waste hours on the phone with MS technical support waiting for some call center phone jockey to help me with problems that I generally knew far more about than he did (they were always men). Well that hasn’t been necessary for years thanks to the internet and MSDN.
Firefox development resources are much less expansive and well-organized, spread as they are across a host of websites run by the Mozilla Foundation and various third parties (XULPlanet, MozillaZine, Mozdev.org, etc.). The good news is that the community is well aware of this issue and is making a concerted effort to turn their developer site, Devmo, into the equivalent of MSDN. In fact, they just changed the site’s URL from developer-test.mozilla.org to developer.mozilla.org, evidence that the site’s maintainers feel that it is coming of age.
Another great resource that I found out about yesterday is the Firefox developers’ IRC channel. This was a discovery of “how did I ever live without it?” proportions. All the Mozilla core developers seem to hang out there, and they’re amazingly willing to lend a hand when a newbie like myself pops up and starts asking idiotic questions. I’ve also been urged by just about everyone I’ve talk to there to make contributions to Devmo. With the power of the nebulous Firefox community now focused on improving developer documentation, as well as the product itself, I’m confident that newcomers to the Mozilla development community will find it increasingly painless to get up to speed.
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