It's been about three weeks now, since we decided, well, to actually start doing something, and we've spent most of this time learning the elements of Web Development: HTML, CSS, DOM, Javascript, a bit of Ajax, XML, and finally, what's relevant to what we're doing, XUL. I felt it worth mentioning that w3schools.com has awesome interactive tutorials on some of the above-mentioned topics. Webdevelopersnotes.com was also pretty useful.
For XUL and for extension-development , Mozilla's XUL School Tutorial served as a good introduction, but I felt this tutorial has been written assuming the reader knows, well, quite a bit, as in it isn't something like "Firefox Extension-Development for Dummies", but surely one can manage pretty well after spending some time with it. Then I found this wonderful book, 'Hacking Firefox'. The version I found is a bit old, but it's got everything we actually need, and its really well-organized too. It guides you through the process of developing an extension through a simple example. Thanks to it, we're now comfortable working with XUL, and are also familiar with the file-organization and directory-structure we should be working with. By the way, we're using Komodo Edit to write our code, as was suggested on this XUL School Tutorial page. Its free, open-source and apart from general features like syntax-coloring, automatic-indentation, code-hinting(really useful!) etc. it also has a project template for developing Firefox Extensions, complete with files required to build the final .xpi file.Well, that automates a lot of stuff, but i guess we're going to do it manually anyway, at least the first time.
So, to put it in a nutshell, we're all wired up, fired up and ready to start coding. Hope we make good progress this week.
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