Thunderbird:Backend Hacking Guide For Newbies

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Back-end Programming for Thunderbird

So, you love C/C++ and want to contribute to Thunderbird, but you are new to Mozilla development in general, and don't know what frameworks, technologies, tools involved in it. You are at the right place, this page is prepared for you.

First, a little bit background. Thunderbird is a cross-platform mail application developed on top of Mozilla framework. It's an open-source application used by millions, and evolving around its contributors. Mozilla framework is the central toolkit, and C/C++ is the core language for back-end programming. Tier 1 platforms for Thunderbird are Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (both PPC and Intel). So, when you develop code for Thunderbird, you have the obligation to make sure that your code works on all of these platforms, unless it's a platform specific patch.

Mozilla development process is large scale and highly distributed. Tools play an essential role to coordinate this collective effort. Every hacker MUST get familiar with these tools to involve.

Tool Arsenal for Mozilla Development

Build Prerequisites

• Windows
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Others

If you wish to build the palm sync extension, you will need to install the Palm CDK (requires free registration).

Debuggers

• MSVC (Windows)
• gdb (Linux, Mac OS X)
• ??

Bug Tracking (and More)

• Bugzilla

Source Control Management

• CVS <link>
• Bonsai <link>

Patching

• Patch

Collaboration

• Pastebin <link>

Build Automation

• Thunderbird Tinderbox
• Tinderstatus for watching Tinderbox status from SeaMonkey or Firefox.
• Performance:Tinderbox_Tests
• MailNews:Performance_Testing
• How to set up a tinderbox (e.g. for standalone/test use)

Community

• IRC
  • Chatzilla
• Newsgroups
• ....

Development Process

Review, Super review <link>

• Licensing

Getting the Source

- <link>

Setting up the Development Environment

• Windows

Note for Windows programmers: If you develop code mostly on Windows and   looking for the same Visual Studio comfort ....

• Mac
• Linux

Building the Code

<link>

Important Components of Mozilla Framework

PL

What is PL? How it is different than platform's C runtime, Secure C functions, etc...

NSPR

NSPR is a cross-platform framework to provide Mozilla application with OS-agnostic facilities such as threading, I/O operations, networking, logging and more. It is crucial for a Mozilla C/C++ hacker to be familiar with this framework in order to work with Thunderbird backend.

Although NSPR documentation is not up-to-date, still it is a very good starting point before you go and check the source code. You can find NSPR documentation at the following links.

• The Netscape Portable Runtime Page
• The Netscape Portable Runtime Reference

XPCOM

What is XPCOM, IDL firebot: uuid, <link>

Creating XPCOM Components

XPCOM string guide

XUL

What is XUL

Best Practices

Memory allocation

<link>

nsCOMPtr<>

<link>

Assertions

....

Understand how to log, trace etc.

• Performance:Leak_Tools
• Debugging Memory Leaks
• QA:Home_Page:Firefox_3.0_TestPlan:Leaks:LeakTesting-How-To
• Mail Logging/Troubleshotting
• LDAP Protocol Logging

...

Understanding threading, Proxy etc.. !!!

... + <link>

Unit Testing (TUnit, cppUnit etc..)

• Mozilla Automated Testing
• MailNews:Performance_Testing

....

Development tools

 o Locklint
 o Firebug
 o

Common Idioms, and Patterns

.... Event sinks, bounded buffers, monitors etc.. .... PR_SUCESS, PR_FAIL ....

Advanced Topics

... Instrumentation, optimization, performance etc...

Sample Projects

• Sample project to learn how to patch and how to submit a patch
• Using NSPR in your applications

 MSVC project
 XCODE project
 SlickeEdit project??
 Eclipse??

• XPCOM: Developing an XP component and running it in a standalone application

 MSVC project
 XCODE project
 SlickeEdit project??
 Eclipse??

• ...

Components of Thunderbird

• MIME
• IMAP
• Address Book
• ...