Development Environment

Prerequisites

• Download Firefox 2, Firefox 3.0.x and Firefox 3.5 from Mozilla.
• Use Eclipse

  We recommend JSDT for development of Molybdenum inside Eclipse as it gives you type inference and thus basic code completion and validation support. More infos here http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-eclipse-jsdt/index.html... For proper inference, use JsDoc Tag Reference JSDT has become part of Eclipse Web Tools Platform Source Editing Project, download latest stuff from there. Some issues and further infos: Syntax Checking Type Inference ECMAScript 4 Support Lots of open issues

Browsing Sources

Goto http://molybdenum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/molybdenum/

Developing Molybdenum

Go to molybdenum-xpi folder and type

$ mvn test -Pinplace -Dfirefox.exec=/path/to/firefox/executable

This will open Firefox with a molybdenum instance pointing directly to your workdir. Thus, you can code Javascript and see changes directly in the browser without doing the full package, deploy, startup cycle.

For convenience reasons, you might want to add profiles to your Maven's settings.xml:

<profile>
    <id>ff2</id>
    <properties>
        <firefox.exec>/usr/lib/firefox/firefox-2</firefox.exec>
    </properties>
</profile>

<profile>
    <id>ff3</id>
    <properties>
        <firefox.exec>/usr/lib/firefox-3.0.5/firefox</firefox.exec>
    </properties>
</profile>

etc.

Running integration tests

As integration tests are running in different firefox versions, you need to point to multiple installations using these variables:

• firefox.exec.ff2
• firefox.exec.ff3
• firefox.exec.ff35

The path of the pdftotext tool has to be provided:

• pdftotext.exec
  This is for instance /usr/bin/pdftotext under Ubuntu Linux. If not installed, install the poppler tools.

and you'll need Apache Tomcat as well:

• tomcat.installdir

and, of course, the Molybdenum Maven Repo (see example below)

For convenience reasons, you might want to add them to your Maven's settings.xml:

<profile>
    <id>moly-default</id>
    <activation>
      <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
    </activation>
    <properties>
        <firefox.exec.ff2>/usr/lib/firefox/firefox-2</firefox.exec.ff2>
        <firefox.exec.ff3>/usr/lib/firefox-3.0.5/firefox</firefox.exec.ff3>
        <firefox.exec.ff35>/opt/firefox-3.5/firefox</firefox.exec.ff35>
        <tomcat.installdir>/opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.27</tomcat.installdir>
    </properties>
    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>molyb-repo</id>
            <url>http://molyb.org/maven-repo</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>
</profile>

Go to molybdenum-dist folder and type

$ mvn clean site