Jetpack Automatically Creates Firefox Add-Ons
In the last four years, a community of 8000 developers has made over 12,000 Firefox add-ons, which were installed over one billion times. Now, Mozilla Labs goes further with the goal to grow the community of developers by orders of magnitude, by facilitating the add-on development with more accessible means through the newly introduced Jetpack experiment. Jetpack is in esence an API, which allows anyone who knows the basic web development technologies, like HTML, CSS and Javascript to build Firefox add-ons in no time.
Practically, if you can build a web page, with the help of Jetpack API the creation of Firefox add-ons becomes much easier, as compared with the main Mozilla add-on development platfrorm.
From the user point of view, Jetpack permits the addition of new features to the Firefox browser without the need to restart it or inducing compatibility issues. In this way, the user online experience will not be disrupted.
Just released, Jetpack version 0.1 is still in the development process and as a consequence it may have various bugs. These are the features highlights in Jetpack version 0.1:
-provides an initial APIs with support for statusbars, tabs, content-scripts, animations, and more.
-has Support for external API libraries (e.g. Twitter)
-jQuery support
-integrated development environment with Bespin, with immediate installs and a fast development cycle
-inline debugging with Firebug
-Jetpack API does not include a fully formed security model, because it is being released for testing, development, and feedback.
To get started with the Jetpack API, first you will have to install the Jetpack Prototype&API. Tutorials and demos are available here.
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