I’m working on my Verbosio templates repository, which is where I’m going to try (again) to build my XML templates project. The first thing I’ve been working on is getting Jasmine working with the Gecko SDK.  It’s going really well.  I’ve written some Python scripts to fetch a Gecko SDK build (in my case, Aurora builds), to concatenate JavaScripts together for Jasmine to use as specifications, and to build a XULRunner application to run the Jasmine specs.  I also have code to launch the XULRunner app with the Gecko SDK, so I can see the results. My goal is to offer the baseline as a separate, clean repository for Jasmine testing from XULRunner or XPCShell.

To get where I want to be, though, I need a little help:

• The Gecko SDK also includes xpcshell, which means it shouldn’t be too hard to add Jasmine testing in XPCShell.  I could then do lightning-quick test runs from the command-line.  Tomas Brambora from Salsita Software’s already done some work along these lines.  I just need his code updated for this project, and MPL tri-licensed for check-in.
• Only about 5% of the code I’m planning to write needs a XUL environment.  With tools like Firebug, ordinary HTML and “content JavaScript” is much easier to debug.  So I need to integrate downloading a Firebug XPI into my project, and I need a new Jasmine reporter which runs in the HTML and sends message events (postMessage, anyone?) to the privileged XUL Jasmine reporter.  Then I can tie the two together to do most of my work in the very well supported HTML Jasmine debugging environment.
• (Alternatively, I could modify my project to download a Firefox Aurora build… but where’s the fun in that?  It would be quick, though.  The reason I don’t like this is Mac development becomes more painful:  Mac binaries are in .dmg images.  Installation, maintenance overhead, no thanks.  The Gecko SDK approach feels better for this.)
• For some reason, the stack trace blocks for test failures are really thin vertically; a little CSS should fix it.
• I could also use some code and developer usability reviews.

However, I think having a Python build script pull a prebuilt SDK and assemble my JavaScript modules for me is a winner.  It”ll save me valuable hours I’d otherwise spend building Mozilla code.  Once I get a stable development environment, I’m going to clone the repository as-is and maintain it separately for anyone who wants a pure Jasmine+XULRunner+XPCShell environment to start with.

If you can spare a few hours to bring me these last few bits, write me a comment.  I think the Mozilla community at large could really use this.

Check-out and build instructions:

hg clone http://hg.code.sf.net/p/verbosio/templates verbosio-templates
cd verbosio-templates
python project.py --update-sdk
# Wait a few minutes for it to get XULRunner; it's a one-time cost
python project.py --test-xul
# XULRunner will open in another window, but it will block the python script from exiting.