Mozilla2:Improving Development Environment

Overview

Sometimes when you work on a project for too long, you cannot see the forrest for the trees. It seems like the good people, who have been working on Mozilla for so long, cannot see how esoteric the requirements for building an extension are. This could lead to a situation where Mozilla is losing potential developers based on bad first impressions. Because when you first experience XUL development, you must first experience the requirements to set up an app before you can even do "Hello World".

The purpose of this page is to bring together related claims from new XUL developpers who have a fresh perspective. The final aim is to ease the work complexity of new XUL developpers, and to make mozilla/firefox a great development environment, out of the box.

In this area, you may either point other developpers to a solution you found, or ask for an improvement. You can link to a specific page / newgroup thread to start a constructive discussion.

Matrix of claims

Feel free to add items to the table below :

Problem	Description	Impacts (firefox, XulRunner, Packaging)	Current solutions	Proposal	Ressources (Bug ID, Link)
Few error messages	When creating a package, firefox will fail silently if their's a syntax error in one of the package description files	Firefox, Packaging	Is there an option to make firefox more verbose ?	Make the extension module more defensive, add clear messages
No simple option	Currently the requirements for setting up the project are very elaborate. There are too many boiler-plate items on the check list that have to be successfully completed. All of which can be assumed (see Ruby on Rails philosophy) but are potential blockers for new developers who silently pass up XUL because it looked like a lot of unnecessary pain.	XUL Runner apps. Mozilla/Firefox extensions.	none	Why can't it be as simple as passing a jar file to xulrunner/firefox bin on the command-line - the same way you pass a jar file to java bin?