Getting Weave (Firefox) Sync to work on Seamonkey (and maybe Thunderbird too!)

This post is about the development environment I am using to get the weave sync (more about the new name change later!) addon to work for Seamonkey. I have setup the development environment so that I can code the extension from one central location (my eclipse IDE) and test any changes made immediately in Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird all at once. Before doing this, making sure the code worked for all three applications was a nightmare, but I finally figured out the right way to do it.

I am doing all the development from ubuntu (jaunty) and using eclipse as my IDE. I have xulrunner installed on ubuntu and xulbooster plugin installed in eclipse. I also have the jsEclipse plugin installed in eclipse for easy editing of javascript files. I followed the build instructions for weave available at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Building to get the latest weave source and build it. Build didn't work the first time around though, and I had to tweak the Makefile a bit to get it to work. Getting the code to install in all Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird applications was done by creating extension proxies (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Setting_up_extension_development_environment#Firefox_extension_proxy_file). Once all that was done I only had to restart each application to view the changes I had made in the code. If any changes are made to the .in files (install.rdf.in and chrome.manifest.in) however I had to run make again.

Name Change

For marketing reasons Weave Sync will soon be renamed as Firefox Sync (from version 1.3 onwards). This will make things very confusing when the addon is adopted to Seamonkey and Thunderbird. Users will then have Firefox Sync installed as an addon on Seamonkey or Thunderbird and that just doesn't make much sense namewise. The name change has not been officially announced yet. I got to know about it from my project mentor's blog( http://home.kairo.at/blog/2010-05/weave_is_firefox_is_seamonkey_is_confusi ). Regardless of the name change however I will continue my project to get tabs and mailnews sync functionality working for Seamonkey. There are plans to integrate Weave to the Mozilla platform soon (like Personas) so all naming issues will disappear once that is done.