Mozilla Labs has announced the launch of Jetpack project that explore new ways to extend and personalize the Web. With Jetpack, Mozilla is making the add-on creation process much more accessible technically, allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play, the company said.
"With Jetpack, we’re building upon our experience over the last four years empowering a community of more than 8,000 developers to produce more than 12,000 add-ons to imagine and build the next generation of the add-ons platform. We want to grow our community of developers by orders of magnitude through making add-on creation much more accessible, and yet more powerful by developing it as an extensible platform for innovation itself. Many useful Jetpack Features can be written in under a dozen lines of code," said in a blog post by Aza Raskin, Atul Varma, and Nick Nguyen on behalf of the Jetpack development team.
Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, added that "Jetpack allows developers to build features that are secure, easy to install, and faster to review. These features can be added to the browser without a restart, or compatibility issues, resulting in little to no disruption to the online experience."
Jetpack will enable developers using Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript to enhance the browser. "With Jetpack, building a new Firefox feature will be as easy as simply writing a few lines of code", Mozilla said. "The Mozilla platform gives developers an easy way to connect with the 300 million users of the Web, empowering Mozilla's community of more than 8,000 developers to share their features with the larger online community", the company said.
The version 0.1 of Jetpack includes:
- Initial Jetpack APIs with support for statusbars, tabs, content-scripts, animations, and more.
- Support for external API libraries (e.g. Twitter)
- jQuery support
- Integrated development environment with Bespin, with immediate installs and a fast development cycle
- Inline debugging with Firebug
- This initial release of the Jetpack API does not include a fully formed security model. It is being released for testing, development, and feedback.
