Mozilla Jetpack flies out of laboratory into loving arms of Firefox

Mozilla has promoted its web extensions prototype package - Jetpack - by pushing it upstairs and readying it for production with its Firefox browser.

The outfit said yesterday that it had created the first release of a software development kit (SDK) for Jetpack to show off the platform's "foundations and extensibility".

However, the all-important APIs for building rich add-ons are missing from this release, noted Mozilla.

"With the Jetpack SDK, authors can take a small amount of high-level code, developed with clear API standards in mind, and turn it into a standard Firefox add-on - one that doesn’t require a restart to install or update," it said.

The experimental Jetpack project began life in May last year and was created for developers with HTML, JavaScript and CSS standard web skills to make add-ons for Mozilla’s popular open source browser, Firefox.

A developer interested in tinkering with the Jetpack SDK, which comes loaded with an extensible Firefox add-ons library, command-line tools and a modern IDE, will need to make a few tweaks to Firefox first, said the organisation.

However, Mozilla is also being cautious about usage of the Jetpack SDK, which it said will replace the Jetpack 0.8 prototype over the next few months.

"For now we recommend that authors who wish to create simple extensions continue to use Jetpack 0.8. The popular and simple IDE available in 0.8 is being revamped with major enhancements for use with the SDK and will be available for developers in Q2 2010," it said. ®