1129502 - Ease creating and live editing FxOS addons

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(DevTools Graveyard :: WebIDE, defect, P1)

Description

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

For now, we have very minimal support of FxOS addons within WebIDE.
We can just push new one to device/simulator, but the toolbox makes no sense.
While editing an addon, we need to open a toolbox related to the app patched by the addon.
Also, live editing is especially important for addons as it is often some quite simple hacks on top of existing codebase and it is really handy to see the changes live!

Comment 1

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

Attachment: patch v1

Here is a prototype...
This patch introduces a new panel "Addon editor" with both
a live style and javascript code editors!
And a "save to addon" button that creates an addon with the necessary manifest.webapp file.

I'm not sure that's the best UX we could provide,
ideally we would make the existing project editor work live for addons,
and, we would figure out how to spawn the toolbox to the app the addon is targetting.

But that gives a good way to experiment with addons in the meantime.

Comment 2

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

ni? to look into this soon.

Comment 3

[Doug Sherk (:drs) (inactive)]

Alexandre, is there any progress on this?

Comment 4

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

Not really, making it right would take quite some time. We discussed with jryans offline and kind of agreed that the current patch isn't something we want to land and expose to app developers.
I would like to evaluate how much time it would take to make it right, by improving the project editor to make it live-edit (instead of introducing yet another "addon editor" in devtools toolbox, next to console/debugger/inspector).

The current patch is also a prototype, but works quite well.
If that's any useful I can push it to cypress.

Comment 5

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

This is useful background to have as you and Jen experiment some more to investigate the future direction of WebIDE as we discussed in our team meeting for Q2.

Probably not something to land as-is, but an informative case study!

Comment 6

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

Won't pursue this experiment given last update on fxos.