14 DAY TRIAL // The second stage of the Mozilla Jetpack extensions platform project is getting underway with the release of the first iteration of the new Jetpack SDK. The goal is to completely rewrite the Jetpack platform using the lessons learned in the first experimental series, but focusing more on scalability, stability and extendability, in short, on creating a platform ready for production use in Firefox.
"With the Jetpack SDK, authors can take a small amount of high-level code, developed with clear API standards in mind, and turn it into a standard Firefox add-on — one that doesn’t require a restart to install or update. Minimal changes to Firefox are required to make this all work," Mozilla's head of user experience, Aza Raskin, explained.
The project is very much in the early stages, but, when the Jetpack SDK reaches maturity, it should be a powerful and complete offering for anyone wanting to create add-ons for Mozilla products and even stand-alone apps.
The Jetpack SDK has three main components, libraries to provide functionality and APIs for the developers to build their extensions on, command-line tools to package and "security-harden" the code, and a full-blown, web-based IDE (integrated development environment) to write the code in.
Mozilla says that the SDK will eventually replace Jetpack 0.8, the final release of the prototype add-on, but, for now, developers wanting to create working extensions should stick with 0.8 until the SDK is more on par with it in terms of functionality.
With the Jetpack SDK, Mozilla is departing quite a bit from the original Jetpack platform. Add-ons built with the SDK will be packaged and installed just like regular add-ons with the provision that this can be done without restarting Firefox. These new add-ons will contain all the needed code from the Jetpack libraries and APIs plus the actual code for the extensions. This means that they'll be self-contained and not depend on any specific Firefox version.
Still, it will be a while until the project is mature enough for developers to start creating actual add-ons using it, so this first release of the Jetpack SDK doesn't really bring anything for the user. By the time Firefox 4 is slated to launch, things should be looking a lot better and it's very likely that, over the next year, add-ons built on the Jetpack SDK will gradually replace the existing ones.