Experiments

This page lists the experiments that resulted from the notional architecture review.

Using the Salesforce.com AJAX toolkit in a Thunderbird extension

• This works perfectly and exists in the current Subversion source code
• For production, the AJAX toolkit will exist within an XPCOM interface implementation consistent with the Salesforce.com data layer in the architecture

Determine a sensible approach for implementing a Thunderbird account

• XULPlanet.com is a great source of documentation for the Mozilla platform's interfaces
• The IDL files in the Mozilla source code do not indicate interface inheritance. Apparently, all the inheritance takes place in the interface implementations
• Setting a preference char value on a preference branch apparently doesn't work when no values existed in that preference branch (or maybe that's always the case? I'm not sure. This is when I was using nsIPrefService instead of nsIPref to get the branch, so perhaps that was the reason?). Setting that preference using nsIPref instead of nsIPrefBranch appears to work fabulously
• The setters for nsIMsgProtocolInfo.defaultLocalPath and nsIMsgIncomingServer.defaultLocalPath are only called by the Thunderbird profile migration code, and new account types don't (yet) need to implement it; it's called on a case-by-case basis by migration for each specific incoming server type that migration knows about, which does not include Thunderforce. To make this an even safer bet, nsRssService, which is build into Thunderbird, throws NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED for its defaultLocalPath setter
• When gdb is used to debug Thunderbird, the Thunderbird user interface takes a long time to start up and runs slowly. Venkman and the error console, thankfully, both work when gdb is debugging Thunderbird (with Venkman, it's a debugger within a debugger)
• The about:config display extension does not appear to work in my debug build of Thunderbird (line 105 of chrome://about_about/content/mrtech-common.js says "browserWindow has no properties")
• Returning the wrong object type in JavaScript code produces a vague NS_ERROR_FAILURE without further details. Be sure that return types are always correct
• Watch out for properties that have the [noscript] attribute. These are apparently not marked as such on XULPlanet.com, but can be seen in the interface's IDL file

Determine a sensible approach for implementing Thunderbird extension details

• Examples include the "about" window and the preferences