Firefox Extension Development Tutorial
All of the guts of your extension will be written in JavaScript. If you already know JavaScript than you are good to go! If you are new to JavaScript it is highly recommended that you read through the next section and the supporting documentation to get used to the syntax.
All of your JavaScript code files should go in the content directory of your extension. This is where the XUL files go as well, so they will be able to easily reference the code. Just insert the following line in an XUL file that needs to run functions from your files.
Working with the DOM
JavaScript is very common in web development because it provides functionality to easily work with the DOM (Document Object Module). All HTML files on the net are rendered by the browser by first building a tree. Each node in the tree corresponds to a tag in the HTML file. Firefox’s XUL files work the same way, all elements are nodes in a large tree (per file). The top level element is called the ‘document’.
There is one very important JavaScript function that you will need to know to be able to work with the XUL elements in your GUI. It allows you to access the object itself, using its ID. For example, when the Home Page Scheduler wants to load the saved schedules into the tree element that displays them to the user, it need to get access to the tree object itself. The tree’s ID is schedulesTree.
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