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dietrich

Jetpacking: The 0.3 SDK and a peek at whats coming next.

I've been working on the Jetpack project for about a month now - implementing features, fixing bugs, and generally helping move things forward as we build out the wide set of capabilities needed to enable an awesome future for Firefox add-on development.

The Jetpack team released the 0.3 version of the SDK yesterday, which has a bunch of platform improvements, and also the context menu API - the first UI feature to ship in the SDK. The SDK documentation has an example of using this feature that shows 1) how easy it is to build UI features with Jetpack, but also 2) shows how add-on development process has changed with the SDK. For example, all of the manual packaging steps are gone. That's right. No more crazy directory structures, no more RDF files, no more GUIDs. All of that stuff is gone, replaced with a couple of simple commands. It's not perfect yet, but expect it to get even easier to both package and deploy add-ons as we build out the SDK further.

So what's next? The 0.4 release is where the feature set of the SDK really starts to blow up:

If you have questions or suggestions, let me know in the comments, or join us on Jetpack developer forum.