Start here if you're interested in further developing Appalachian. If you're only interested in using Appalachian for your normal browsing, see the notes on installation.

Contents

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What You Need

  • Firefox (version 2.0 or later)
  • Ant (version 1.6.2 or later, which in turn requires Java)
  • Subversion client (version 1.2 or later)
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Other Useful Tools

You may also want to install Firebug, a Firefox add-on that greatly assists in both web and add-on development.

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Starting Appalachian Development

  1. Open your favorite shell/terminal on Unix/MacOSX or a DOS Prompt on Windows
  2. Make sure that Ant is installed and that ant and svn are available commands
  3. Check out Appalachian from the Subversion repository as follows: svn checkout http://simile.mit.edu/repository/appalachian/trunk/ appalachian
  4. Type cd appalachian
  5. Type ant

You're ready to start working. To pseudo-install an XPI and completely avoid the installation step during your development cycle, see the related section of the Piggy Bank development document (skip the final three steps). Appalachian's unique ID is afc2abb6-da22-4c81-96b8-64ccb9a51e10. You can take it a step further by keeping the file in one location and copying or symlinking it into each profile's extension directory.

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Layout

The bulk of the add-on's files are laid out accordingly: 

+ src/
|-+ extension/
  |-+ defaults/
  |-+ chrome/
    |-+ locale/
    |-+ skin/
    |-+ content/
      |-+ scripts/
      |-+ sql/

There are other files, but the ones used for the plug-in are in the leaves of the directory tree outlined above. The skin directory contains images and stylesheets, the locale directory contains messages in the en-US locale (so far). The content directory is where most of the work can be found in XUL, SQL, and JavaScript files.

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Debugging

Debugging is not entirely built into the plugin yet. You can wipe out your OpenID database using the button found at the bottom of the Appalachian preferences pane (to find the pane, either go through Tools and then Add-ons, selecting the preferences for Appalachian, or right click on the Appalachian status icon to bring up a context menu; the preferences option is at the bottom of the list).

To receive certain messages through the console, edit src/extension/chrome/content/scripts/debug.js and set the debug variable to true. Only the fsm.js file has been instrumented at this time.

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Ant Tasks

  • Use ant to generated template-reliant files.
  • Use ant distclean to remove templated files and XPI builds.
  • Use ant xpi to build an XPI in the base directory, named appalachian-<version>.xpi'.
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References

Retrieved from "http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Appalachian_Developer_Notes"