Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
62 lines (46 loc) · 2.56 KB

Readme.md

File metadata and controls

62 lines (46 loc) · 2.56 KB
Raw

Firebox

Application runtime shared with Firefox that can be used to write cross platform desktop applications such as Firefox using web technologies & nodejs style JS modules system. Firebox applications are [npm][] packages with a bundled HTML document gets to require modules from the package and it's dependencies.

Features

  • Apps written in modern HTML5, CSS3, JS and WebGL.
  • Support for [nodejs][] style module system and with most node APIs exposed via modules.
  • Support for XUL+XPCOM+JSCTypes to overcome webplatform limitations when necessary.
  • Easy to package and distribute apps.
  • Available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows

Usage

For now you are required to have a Firefox Nightly build to run firebox apps. Usage is little complicated for now but it's going to get better soon.

/Applications/FirefoxNightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -app /path/to/firebox/application.ini /path/to/app/

During development you may want to use debugger. You can start debugger by passing additional arguments:

/Applications/FirefoxNightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -app /path/to/firebox/application.ini /path/to/app/ -debugger 6000

Above comment will start debugger that will listen on port 6000. You can connect to it via Firefox WebIDE or via remote debugger by going to Tools > WebDeveloper > Connect....

Quick Start

As a first step you would need to setup a npm package for your application, by creating package.json file, which can be as simple as:

{
  "name": "hello-firebox"
}

Your application will need some UI which is defined in HTML/CSS/JS there for you would need to create index.html document. (If you'd prefer to have a different name for entry document, just add launchPath key to a package.json with a value that is a relative path to entry document with in your package).

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello World!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello World!</h1>
    You have access to require <script>document.write(typeof(require))</script>.
  </body>
</html>