14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox OS can be considered officially launched now that the first phones have started selling. But the task is far from over. Mozilla still has a long way to go before slowing down, Firefox OS has a monumental task ahead of it.
Key in Firefox OS' success, more than anything that Mozilla or its partners do, are developers. Mozilla needs to attract developers to the platform. The fact that Firefox OS relies solely on the web is a good start.
But it's not enough, while the languages may be familiar, developing a Firefox OS app is not exactly the same thing as building a website.
To help with that, Mozilla started packaging code it built for its own use as Building Blocks, i.e. components that other apps could use instead of rewriting code to do the same thing.
Up until now, Mozilla maintained two repositories for building Blocks, one in the main Gaia repository, i.e. the full source of the Firefox OS UI, and one separate for developers.
But this proved less than ideal, so there's now just one repository, the unified one. To mark this change, Mozilla also wanted to rewrite and update the documentation and believed this to be a good occasion to try something new with Building Blocks, i.e. build a site rather than an app.
The result is Building Firefox OS, a new one-stop show for Firefox OS developers built using the same tools as those they will be using for their apps.
"Now we are proud to announce that what we started as a small personal project is a reality thanks to the help of a lot of great people and the huge support provided by Mozilla to make this happen," Mozilla explained.
"We’re working hard with the solely objective of making all the information available through BFFOS truly useful for the dev and design community," it added.