Writing a Firefox Extension for AIM
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007I am learning the wonderful world of Mozilla. Specifically writing an extension for Firefox. There are some really awesome things about this platform. Firefox is not just a great browser, but it’s a really great platform. XPCOM let’s me write javascript code to do sockets and all sorts of wild stuff. I haven’t even scratched the surface yet.
In any case I’m writing an extension to let me send links to people who are logged into America Online Instant Messenger. AOL just released a ton of developer tools for embedding AIM into your web pages, and a ton of SDK’s but I’ve decided to use the old TOC2 protocol for the project. The reason: I didn’t want to start trying to deploy XPCOM, C++ bindings and all sorts of headaches with my first extension. I want this to be fun, easy, and useful for my first try. Something a little more advanced than Hello, World.
In any case i’ve spent the last two nights on it and I found an old TOC protocol implemented in javascript and created my first XUL add-in. Next steps are to upgrade the TOC to TOC2 protocol and figure out a way to test it properly without destroying my user account.