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I'd like to develop an extension for a browser which does the following.

Prerequisite: Text has been selected, add-on has been triggered (e.g. by click in context menu)

  • read selected text
  • pass the text to a (e.g. RESTful) webservice
  • retrieve a list of comments from the webservice
  • show them in the browser
  • optional: show also an input field below to send another comment to the webservice

Writing a Firefox add-on became quite annoying since I haven't found a proper documentation and IDE (with a handy build process).

Which Browser/IDE combination do you recommend for rapid add-on development/prototyping?

Matthias
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  • For Firefox addon development, you generally don't need a build process until you're ready to ship it. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/setting_up_extension_development_environment#Firefox_extension_proxy_file or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/extension-developer/ which automates the creation of the "proxy file" (though Extension Developer seems to have some issues in Firefox 4+) – Tyler Jun 19 '11 at 17:25

1 Answers1

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For Google Chrome, you use web technologies to create extensions. (AFAIK Firefox is the same thing). The documentation for Google Chrome Extensions is documented pretty well: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/index.html

For the case you have mentioned, I have answered another user on how to capture selected text and send them to a service with a working example that you can learn from if you want:

Chrome Extension: how to capture selected text and send to a web service

Regarding the tools that you can use, it depends on what your comfortable with. Personally, I just use an editor that has syntax hilighting such as VIM, Notepad2, etc. Some people use dreamweaver, emacs, notepad, etc. At the end it all matters on your taste.

Good luck!

Community
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Mohamed Mansour
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