Tag Archives: IDE

add-ons CVS development environment Eclipse extension firefox php plugins procrastination source control tools web-development XUL

Setting up a Firefox extension development environment

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Procrastato, a Firefox productivity extension I have a Firefox extension called Procrastato.  It reminds you to get back to work when you’re mindlessly surfing the web.  Procrastato is a very simple add-on but I’ve found that getting started in developing Firefox add-ons isn’t so simple.

Although I’ve just dipped my feet into the world of XUL and Firefox Extension development I thought I would share what I’ve been using to get up and running.

First things first – take a look at the Building an Extension page at Mozilla.org.  Make sure you at least read through that page before getting started.  It can be a little disappointing to see how much you need to have in place in order to do a simple “hello world” test extension, but it’s worth getting an overall picture before jumping in.

Also, before getting to “hello world,” there are a couple of extensions that are useful for developing extensions:

If you’ve used Eclipse for Java or PHP development you’ll probably want to use it for extension development with the XulBooster plugin.  XulBooster is useful for two reasons:

  1. It helps with housekeeping chores like setting up your install.rdf and chrome.manifest and exporting a .xpi package.
  2. It give you some code coloring and syntax highlighting for those .xul files.

Now you should be ready to go.

A couple of notes:XulBooster will automatically include an empty <em:updateURL/> element in your install.rdf.  If you don’t have a secure URL for updates (starting with https://), you might get this warning from addons.mozilla.org when you try to upload your new version:

Add-ons cannot use an external updateURL. Please remove this from install.rdf and try again.

Just open the install.rdf file and deleted that line to solve the problem.

How do you set up a PHP development environment?

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DSCN1377-1Are you a budding web developer wondering where to start?  An old hand looking for new tools?  Let me tell you a little bit about how I do my PHP / web development work, and maybe some it will be of use to you.

I am starting up some work on Mealographer again.  It definitely needs it, I did a usability test about a year ago and still haven’t fixed the issues I uncovered.  I haven’t been doing a lot of work in PHP recently, at my day job is all Java all the time.  I used to be happy with a text editor, a server somewhere and a browser, but since I’ve been using Eclipse I’ve become spoiled by better tools.

So what do you need to get started?  If you just want to play around, all you need is:

A text editor.  You can use Notepad, but I’ve used HTMLKit in the past.  It’s free and it does basic stuff like syntax highlighting nicely.

A server.  You can set everything up on a remote server, many have PHP accounts for as low as $5/month.  Right now I use Site5 [referral link].  I also want to give a shout out to Q5Media, though PHP isn’t their main thing.

A browser.  This is pretty basic, but worth mentioning.  You need Firefox, which is free to download.  You’ll also want to test things in IE, which you probably already had.

You can do real work with just the above.  It’s worth taking advantage of all the great tools out there, though, including:

An integrated development environment (IDE) – I’m pretty happy with Eclipse for Java development (or the related IBM RAD 6).  What about for PHP?  Right now I’m trying to decide between PHPEclispe and the PDT plugin.  Anyone have an opinion on which way to go?

A local development server – If you want to run PHP locally on windows, you can install Apache or get PHP working on IIS.  In my experience, though, you can’t beat WAMPSERVER – it includes Apache, MySQL and PHP and makes configuration pretty easy.

Source control – There’s no way to keep track of a project of any real size without a change management system.  I have used CVS a lot, and SmartCVS is a good free client.  There are also CVS plugins for Eclipse.  I have heard a lot of good things about Subversion as well.

Web developer plugins for Firefox – seriously, if you don’t have these, you might as well tie your hand behind your back when writing JavaScript of CSS.  Here’s a good list of Firefox plugins.

So that’s what I use – what am I missing?  Post suggestions in the comments below.