AsiaCamp2011/Schedule/Product and Technology Track/Building Thunderbird Extensions

Building Your First Thunderbird Extension

• Speaker: Siddharth Agarwal
• Time: 10:00, Sunday 20 November, in Lavender Room
• Duration: 45 minutes

• Summary: Web developer but haven't built Mozilla extensions? Veteran Firefox extension developer looking to develop extensions for Thunderbird as well? Thunderbird offers a powerful platform for extensions, and there are plenty of opportunities for you to make your mark. We'll look at the application's general architecture and APIs for common tasks: opening tabs, examining messages and performing global queries using the powerful global database and search engine. Some knowledge of HTML and JavaScript is presumed but everybody's welcome to join in.

• If you're interested in following the demos on your own laptop, please
  • install Thunderbird 8
  • download the demo profile and extension
  • for best results, install the latest versions of either Git or Mercurial if you don't already have them

The demo extensions are also available on Bitbucket and GitHub.

• Resources:
  • #maildev on irc.mozilla.org
  • Setting up an extension development environment
  • MXR for comm-central
  • Thunderbird Conversations, download, source code
  • Email-chat, a demo extension by Jonathan Protzenko presenting email conversations as IM chats
  • thunderbird-stdlib, a library allowing you to do commonly-needed things easily.
• Presentation slides (to provide after you talk): PDF, PowerPoint

• Ideal audience size: 15-20

• Equipment needs (video projector already included):

• Submit a question for the speaker here: Etherpad