The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

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August 31, 2004

New Mozilla Website

Mozilla.org has just pushed its shiny new website. Thanks to the hard work of Steven Garrity, Daniel Burka and their crew at Silverorange for putting together a site we can all be proud of. Thanks to Bart for relentlessly pushing our vision, to website-drivers for facilitating the change and helping it come off smoothly (David Baron and fantasai especially for their ever thoughtful commentary and Myk Melez for handling a bunch of the technical issues).

It's also worth noting that while this is our best site yet, we couldn't have reached this point without the intermediate step that came in between the original 1998 website (and my ghastly Foundation-launch front page hack in 2003) and now - so big thanks to Dave Shea for helping us over the past year and giving us a site that allowed us to kick off our end user initiative so effectively.

Now, go check out the new site!

Posted by ben at 2:48 PM

August 29, 2004

Buh-bye VersionCheck

Vlad and I talked a bit last night and we think (now) it is a better idea to attempt to unify the Extension Update systems into a single RDF-based system (i.e. ditch the web service).

Here's why:

the web service is tricky to set up and administer
the web service involves huge amounts of data per request going back and forward to the server - wrapping function calls and their results in globs of XML - using the RDF format involves loading a remote datasource with the function parameters encoded into a GET query string which is quite compact. Data sent back is in the RDF/XML format which we have solid, well tested parsers for (used for all manner of other things over the past few years, such as the local store, mimetypes.rdf, etc)
the web services implementation currently does not seem to be able to load WSDL proxies over HTTPS
it is very difficult to test update of extensions that use the VersionCheck service, it is relatively much easier to create test cases for extensions that use the custom RDF format
the code that uses the web service has not been as tested at all in a production enviroment. Extension authors have individually been using the custom RDF update format and associated parser since 0.9.

Here's why now:

If we ship a release that requires VersionCheck, we will (for the period of time that we want to support 0.10) be obliged to keep Tomcat running reliably. It is thus very desirable for us to convert to using this other method before we become locked into doing so. The GET query string data blob will be versioned so that future updates can be discerned.

Work required:

remove the Web Services code (ben)
make all extension update checks run through the code path currently used for custom RDF update files (better tested than VersionCheck) (ben)
make a php script on UMO that generates a RDF file based on versioned query parameters using the umo db (vlad)

I plan on attacking the client side of this this weekend and will roll up my PR+ blocking EM bugs into it. Ultimately I believe this will provide a more reliable environment for extension updating, and will ultimately allow us to ship a quality 0.10 earlier and have a more maintainable server environment moving forward.

Posted by ben at 3:02 PM

August 16, 2004

Updating your Extensions and Themes for Firefox 1.0 Preview Release and Thunderbird 0.8

Extension and Theme Authors Must Read This!

Posted by ben at 6:47 PM

August 15, 2004

Away

I'm going to be in Auckland, New Zealand for the next few weeks, starting August 20, up until September 24. The best way to reach me is email, as usual, and that info remains the same. I should be online from there by August 23 or so.

Posted by ben at 7:03 PM

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