CS3108 Independent work on Mozilla

I thought it would be nice to write a bit on the course module in case any potential student wishes to undertake such a course in the future (hopefully they continue to provide this module!) The fifth week of school has gone by and so far we’ve had 4 sharing sessions on open source work and development on Mozilla. Information about the projects being chosen for this batch can be found at The Rumbling Edge and  CS3108 site. I would say that the experience so far has been great. Although most of us are being thrown into the deep end with lots of information overloading, I’ve been able to get some help from people over at #seneca and probably #maildev ( both channels on irc.mozilla.org) in the very near future. Best thing about the whole open source community and IRC channels, it reminded me of how it felt like in the days when i just took up the interest in programming and writing IRC scripts and all.

What do I want to achieve by the end of this course? (A question posted by Gary in today’s session) Completing the port of Personas over to Thunderbird would of course be the main objective. If time permits, I hope to further some of the functionalities of Personas which are specific to Thunderbird. Joe Sabash  mentioned the idea of allowing themes to change according to the current sender of the mail which I thought was real cool. I think that some accessibility functions can be considered too. I do hope that my work on porting Personas to Thunderbird will spin off other cool ideas based on the extension.

I’m getting some headway with work on Personas. Although I might have just struck a nail and found out that I might need to work with some XPCOM that deals with C++ code. Mozilla Crash Course (which Hendrik told me about in today’s session) has got very detailed instructions on development of extentions and for the Mozilla platform other than those at MDC. Jminta has posted some stuff on getting XPCOM to work on Thunderbird. This will probably be helpful for my next few days of work.