Lily is a free tool that allows you to automatically create Mozilla Firefox add-ons. It is a browser based visual programming platform created in Javascript.


Lily is practically itself a Mozilla Firefox add-on. Besides add-ons, it provides the opportunity to automatically make standalone applications compatible with many operating systems. You don't have to know Javascript or any other programming language because your add-ons or stand alone applications can be defined using a graphical procedure of connecting some modules that will control the data flow.

Lily is not compatible with Firefox 3, but, if you want to install on the same operating system both version 2.x and 3.0 of Mozilla Firefox browser, a portable version can be used. Lily can be installed on Firefox 2.x version, like any other add-on. After you restart the browser, Lily can be found on the Tools menu. In order to discover the basic Lily functionalities, it is recommended to begin with the sample applications provided in the directories Demos and Examples, which are present in the Lily distribution archive.

Lily program documents (also called patches) are .json (JavaScript Object Notation) files, which represent a file format for easy data interchange and is based on Javascript programming language. For example if you will open any of the applications present in the Demos directory, like Google Maps-Yahoo Local-XUL Tree, you will notice that you can use it inside the patch window. Any Lily document can be saved as add-on or as standalone application with the help of XULRunner.

The add-ons must be installed on a new Firefox profile in order to work with Lily installed on the same browser. For standalone application building, you must just specify the full path to the XULRunner runner installation directory. The application created in this manner will run in its own window without the need of a web browser support.

In conclusion, if you want to automate the task of creating Firefox add-ons or standalone applications, Lily can help you by providing a simple method of graphically connecting modules that will form the base of your application. There are available many modules, like web services modules, UI modules, multimedia modules and many more. Practically, you will be able to build any type of application or Firefox add-on in a very short time.