n00b needs quickstart help

[nolybab]

Most of the documentation that I can find on creating firefox
extensions is fairly dated material. I did find some newer
information, but only the most trivial applications (like displaying
hello world in the status bar). Anyway, any pointers would be VERY
much appreciated...here is what I am trying to do first:

1) Display an icon in the status-bar (done)
2) When I click the icon, expand/collapse a 'window' at the bottom of
the screen. Basically, just think of how Firebug works, when you click
the firebug a nice UI expands...This is very trivial, I know, but so
far I have been unable to get this to work (spent 1 day so far and
only managed to get my icon in the status bar).

After I accomplish this, the next thing I want to do is to start
'parsing' the current page that I am on, but I can get to that
later...Right now i just need help getting this simple part working,
and then I can focus on what to do next.

Thanks,
noly

[Zorkzero]

Fore me, one of the most important documentation for extension
development is the XUL Tutorial: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_Tutorial
.

I would use the DOM Inspector, to look where in the browser tree the
Firebug window is inserted, then I would create my window using XUL
and insert it in the same place.

[Peter Schmidt]

nolybab schrieb:

> 2) When I click the icon, expand/collapse a 'window' at the bottom of
> the screen. Basically, just think of how Firebug works, when you click
> the firebug a nice UI expands...This is very trivial, I know, but so
> far I have been unable to get this to work (spent 1 day so far and
> only managed to get my icon in the status bar).
>

Firebug is open source, you can look how it works.

take a look at the browser overlay in content/firebug/browserOverlay.xul
this looks promising:
<!-- Firebug panel -->
<vbox id="appcontent">
<splitter id="fbContentSplitter" collapsed="true"/>
<vbox id="fbContentBox" collapsed="true" persist="height">
</vbox>
</vbox>

to be sure you are on the right way, search #appcontent in the
browser.xul file ( you can find this file in
firefox.installation.path/chrome/browser.jar:content/browser, it would
not be wrong to extract all the jars for further investigations )

<vbox id="appcontent" flex="1">
<tabbrowser id="content" disablehistory="true"
..... />
</vbox>

seems to be the way to go!

petschm

[John J. Barton]

Peter Schmidt wrote:
> nolybab schrieb:
>> 2) When I click the icon, expand/collapse a 'window' at the bottom of
>> the screen. Basically, just think of how Firebug works, when you click
>> the firebug a nice UI expands...This is very trivial, I know, but so
>> far I have been unable to get this to work (spent 1 day so far and
>> only managed to get my icon in the status bar).
>>
>
> Firebug is open source, you can look how it works.

The XUL code below is here:
http://code.google.com/p/fbug/source/browse/branches/firebug1.5/content/firebug/browserOverlay.xul#113

>
> take a look at the browser overlay in content/firebug/browserOverlay.xul
> this looks promising:
> <!-- Firebug panel -->
> <vbox id="appcontent">
> <splitter id="fbContentSplitter" collapsed="true"/>
> <vbox id="fbContentBox" collapsed="true" persist="height">
> </vbox>
> </vbox>

The JS code that un-collapses the fbContentBox when the status bar icon
is pressed is here:
http://code.google.com/p/fbug/source/browse/branches/firebug1.5/content/firebug/firebug.js#980

If you can succeed at installing an using Chromebug, then you can see
the result of the overlay in the browser.xul context.

http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Chromebug_User_Guide

jjb

[nolybab]

Peter, ZorkZero and John, I got it working!!! I sure appreciate the
help...I just didn't know how to even wrap my brain around getting
started, both of you gave me just enough of a clue so that I could get
a good start...of course, I had to read like 100 webpages and sift out
what I needed to find, but I can't thank you both enough for your
help :) I even managed to get jQuery 1.3.2 working, I have all my
functionality namespaced (even jQuery) and I have made more progress
today than I thought I would all weekend...at this rate, I'll be
pretty much done with my project's short-term requirements by
tomorrow :)

Cool beans...thanks so much...give me a few weeks and i'll be
answering questions for the next-gen n00bs ;)

lol, thanks :) noly