Jetpack/Roadmap-2011
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Jetpack 2011 Roadmap | |
| Owner: Myk Melez | Updated: 2011-02-4 | |
| The top three 2011 priorities for Jetpack are: 1) via Add-on SDK and Add-on Builder, to ship a great platform for creating add-ons for desktop Firefox 4 and up, 2) to build tools, write docs, conduct outreach, and concoct strategies to help developers migrate traditional add-ons to the new platform in time for the e10sified version of Firefox, and 3) To update and expand the platform to support the development of add-ons for Firefox on mobile devices. | ||
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Priorities
Our top three priorities, in the order we will tackle them:
Via Add-on SDK and Add-on Builder, ship a great platform for creating add-ons for desktop Firefox 4 (and up).
Doing this is the culmination of all the great work we have done to date, and it is the essential first step to everything else we hope to accomplish not only in 2011 but beyond. Nothing is more important to our project until this is done.
The Jetpack project will ship the initial versions of these products, and the add-on platform they provide, at our earliest possible opportunity.
Build tools, write docs, conduct outreach, and concoct strategies to help developers migrate traditional add-ons to the new platform in time for the e10sified version of Firefox.
If the Jetpack project is successful in achieving its foundational goals to bring in new developers, Mozilla will have many new add-on developers by the end of 2011. But we'll still have many developers of existing add-ons that will need to change their add-ons to work with the e10sified version of Firefox. And those add-ons will have millions of users who will still want to use them when they upgrade to that version of Firefox.
The Jetpack project will do everything in our power to make that transition as painless as possible.
Update and expand the platform to support the development of add-ons for Firefox on mobile devices.
Mozilla leaders recognized a number of years ago that the expanding web-using world population was switching from traditional computing devices to mobile ones, and Mozilla has put a ton of effort into evolving Gecko and Firefox into a great mobile browsing platform and product. Mozilla cares as much about user choice and personalization on mobile devices as it does on desktop ones, and our add-on efforts must reflect that.
The Jetpack project will help make add-on development a great experience for Firefox on mobile devices.
Non-priorities
Three tasks to which we will not set ourselves in 2011:
Deep extensibility.
The traditional add-on platform, with features like XUL overlays and XPCOM components, was designed for deep extensibility. Indeed, you can do almost anything to Firefox with the traditional platform.
But the vast majority of existing and potential add-ons don't need this capability; the remainder can still be implemented using the traditional add-on platform; and projects like Mozilla Labs' Chromeless Browser experiment are better positioned to explore a potential future replacement.
The Jetpack project will leave deep extensibility to the traditional add-on platform and Mozilla Labs experiments.
Apps.
Mozilla, other browser vendors, and other industry participants are hard at work defining standards, UX affordances, and distribution channels for the next generation of web apps. But apps differ from add-ons, even if they sometimes bundle themselves as such for lack of better distribution channels.
Mozilla Labs' Open Web Applications project is kicking ass here and is much better positioned to identify and address the exposure and distribution needs of apps, while Mozilla's developer tools team headed by Kevin Dangoor is the right locus for activity around tools for web developers.
The Jetpack project will not build tools for app development and distribution.
Firefox-SDK integration.
The SDK and Builder bundle API implementations with each individual add-on. This strategy, akin to static linking for compiled code, has its downsides, but it allows the products and add-on platform to evolve independently of the Firefox release cycle, avoids dependency hell, and makes it easier to architect and nurture a rich ecosystem of third-party APIs.
The Jetpack project will not land its API implementations in the Firefox tree and ship them with Firefox.
Note that the absence of a goal from the priorities list, or its presence on the anti-list, does not mean we won't accept code that achieves it. To the contrary, provided such contributions don't work at cross-purposes to the core goals of the project, we couldn't be more thrilled to see our technologies get used by the Mozilla and broader open source communities.
So if you're a Thunderbird developer, a web dev tools hacker, a XULRunner appmeister, or anyone else who wants to see Add-on SDK and Builder (or their component parts) better support your own particular use cases (or get repurposed into your own new products), know that we want to see that too! So please don't hesitate to dream about how the project can help you, talk about your ideas with us, and make them happen.
Plan
In December 2010, we released Add-on SDK 1.0b1, and in January 2011 we released Add-on Builder 1.0a7.
Until we reach Add-on SDK 1.0 final, we will continue development of beta versions of the SDK in four week cycles comprising three weeks of open development followed by a week of stabilization and release preparation. After we reach Add-on SDK 1.0 final, we will continue development of the SDK with a roughly month-long cycle culminating in an alpha release, another culminating in a beta release, and a 1-2 month cycle culminating in a final release.
We plan the following releases:
| 2011 | early Q2 | mid Q3 | late Q4 |
| Releases | SDK 1.0, Builder 1.0b1 | SDK 1.1, Builder 1.0 | SDK 1.2, Builder 1.1 |
| Themes | initial set of restartless, e10s-compatible APIs and tools for building add-ons for Firefox 4.0 on the desktop | tools, docs, etc. for migrating traditional add-ons to SDK/Builder | support for building add-ons for Firefox on mobile devices |