14 DAY TRIAL // The Mozilla Jetpack project has come a long way and is now close to releasing the first production-ready build. The Mozilla Add-on SDK 1.0 beta 1 has been announced. Along with the name change - the Jetpack moniker has been dropped in favor of the more generic Add-on SDK - the release is labeled as a "feature-stable" beta.
"The Jetpack team is thrilled to announce the release of Add-on SDK 1.0b1, the first beta release of Mozilla’s new software development kit for building Firefox add-ons!," Mozilla announced on the Add-ons blog.
"Add-on SDK 1.0b1, the culmination of months of hard work and nine alpha releases, is the best way to get started with building add-ons for the upcoming Firefox 4," it added.
For those that kept up with Jetpack development, especially with the Jetpack SDK, changes should not be that big. There are a couple of new features from the previous Jetpack SDK 0.9, but much of the work has been focused on Electrolysis support, which is not yet complete.
For existing APIs and features, there have been more updates and you can check out everything new in the release notes.
Add-on SDK 1.0b1 is the first of several betas planned before the platform is labeled as stable. It is not feature complete so new APIs and big changes to the existing ones are to be expected.
However, the Mozilla team notes that it should be safe to start developing even at this stage as the first beta is "feature-stable." What this means is that there should not be any changes that are backwards incompatible or that break existing functionality unless for a really good reason.
Support for the new add-on platform is built into Firefox 4. Add-ons created with the new Add-on SDK can be built using standard web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. A big advantage for the user is that they don't require a browser restart.
Mozilla Add-on SDK 1.0b1 (beta 1) is available for download here on Softpedia.