Jetpack was a working group which wrote a
software development kit
A software development kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific ...
for
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...
add-ons. They produced the Add-on SDK, a set of
APIs, a
runtime, and a command-line tool for creating and running add-ons, and the Add-on Builder, a Web-based
integrated development environment
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools ...
which used the SDK.
Add-ons developed with the SDK were written in
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...
,
CSS, and
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
using
CommonJS
CommonJS is a project with the goal to establish conventions on the module ecosystem for JavaScript outside of the web browser. The primary reason for its creation was a major lack of commonly accepted forms of JavaScript module units which could ...
conventions. They did not require the user to restart Firefox when they were installed or uninstalled. The SDK's APIs were high-level, task-oriented, and designed to insulate developers from changes across Firefox versions.
Mozillians running the project made a tool called the Jetpack Prototype. APIs provided by the Jetpack Prototype were not compatible with the Add-on SDK.
References
External links
Jetpack Project PageAdd-on Builder and SDKAdd-on SDK Documentation
Mozilla
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