Features/Jetpack/Simplify the Add-on SDK

Status

Team

Open issues/risks

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Stage 1: Definition

1. Feature overview

The Add-on SDK's interfaces (APIs, commands, the required structure for an addon) and implementations are overcomplex in a variety of ways, leading to a higher barrier to entry for new developers, a more difficult developer experience, and a greater risk of bugs than is necessary.

Simplicity is a characteristic of product features, but, like performance and certain other such characteristics, it can also be treated as a feature in and of itself, because the overall simplicity of a software product impacts its usability and quality.

This feature is to simplify the SDK's interfaces and implementations to the degree possible in a variety of ways, including:

• merge bootstrap.js and components/harness.js, dropping attempts at ff3.6/gecko1 compatibility
• merge cuddlefish.js and securable-module.js, breaking code that does require("cuddlefish") for other purposes (sub-loaders? control over loading process?)
• build a XPI for 'cfx run' and 'cfx test' too, reducing the number of supported code paths from two to one
• enable the main addon code and the addon's own HTML pages to communicate directly with each other (rather than having to communicate though a content script)
• remove package abstraction for SDK's own APIs, moving their code to top-level lib/, doc/, and test/ directories
• support putting all addon files into a single top-level directory for simple addons that don't have enough files to justify breaking them up into data/, lib/, and test/ subdirectories
• resolve relative and root-relative text strings passed to URL parameters relative to the location of the script and top-level addon directory for all URL parameters, respectively, so addons can specify "/data/foo.txt" in place of require("self").data.url("foo.txt")
• require in content scripts?
• Remove some generalization code contained in the python portions of the SDK

2. Users & use cases

The target audience is addon developers. The use case is an add-on developer using the Add-on SDK (either directly or via the Add-on Builder) to build an addon.

3. Dependencies

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4. Requirements

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Non-goals

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Stage 2: Design

5. Functional specification

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6. User experience design

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Stage 3: Planning

7. Implementation plan

Many of the items listed in the overview will begin in conjunction with our P1 work so developers do not have to devote 100% of their time to just one feature. Therefore, the status of this full-set feature will be in progress until all items are completed or determined to be part of another feature, or no longer needed or wanted.

8. Reviews

Security review

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Privacy review

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Localization review

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Accessibility

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Quality Assurance review

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Operations review

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Stage 4: Development

9. Implementation

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Stage 5: Release

10. Landing criteria

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Feature details

Team status notes