Firefox/Projects/Extension Manager API

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Revision as of 18:02, 5 February 2010 by Mossop (talk | contribs)

Overview

Sprint lead
Mossop
Reviewers
Rob Strong, Shawn Wilsher, Benjamin Smedberg
Description
The Extension Manager has been extended repeatedly to add new features. There is now large scope for cleanups and improvements with refactoring the core code and APIs knowing what we know now.

Status

Basic management functionality is supported, working on implementing downloads and updates.


Goals / Use Cases

  • Primary goals
    • Support a wider range of add-on types managed through the same API
    • Allow application/extension developers to be able to easily query the state of installed items
    • Make it easier for applications to replace the add-ons UI with their own implementation by making all necessary information available through the defined API
  • Secondary goals
    • Remove direct access to the datastore
    • Simplify the internal code and speed up startup times
    • Minimize the use of RDF throughout the backend to allow for easy replacement in the future
    • Migrate from an RDF based datastore to an SQLite based datastore
    • Remove extensions.cache
    • Reduce the number of unnecessary restarts during startup

Design

The new API is proposed at Extension Manager:API Rewrite. Some of this work will assist in the implementation of Extension Manager:UI Update.

Planning

Target Release

Firefox.next. All of the initial work must ship before beta 1.

References