I want to begin Firefox OS development, but I'm a bit lost. I've tried
researching in the past, but there were never direct answers to my questions
and I'm assuming some of the problems I've run into are just because some
things aren't ready yet (for example I saw remote debugging is disabled until
it's changed to be reimplemented).
Remote debugging is available in the simulator and can also be done on
the devices though it requires some hacks to work; see here for more
information on the topic:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/Debugging/Setting_up
Anyways the point is I want to test my web app so I can bring it to my Firefox
Phone and hopefully continue to develop for Firefox OS. The big problem I ran
into in the past is that I haven't been able to test a local app on the Firefox
OS Simulator. I don't have a website of my own and it seems that by uploading
it to my school's site, it forces one of a set of MIME types that makes Firefox
OS not recognize the manifest.webapp file. Either that, or I set up my
manifest.webapp file wrong, which I'm fairly certain I didn't. If I need to, I
can set up a server on my own computer so that it's ideal for testing, but I'm
pretty new to that (I've only truly immersed myself into server-sided
development over the past few months).
The next problem is testing the app on my phone. Is there a way to get it on
there without have it uploaded somewhere? From what I've seen, there's no way
to access the OS's files at all, except by a MicroSD card (which doesn't really
help). I'm using the GP Peak, if that helps figure out the answer. And is there
currently any way to debug the app while it's running live? I saw remote
debugging is disabled, but I'm not so sure how necessary that is given that I
have a USB cable to plug into my computer (unless that'd be considered remote
debugging too).
The best environment for getting started is the Firefox OS simulator. It
allows for very easy testing and debugging and the last version allows
you to push your app directly to your device:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Firefox_OS_Simulator
And last (which kinda ties into the question I just asked), how can I modify
the OS? If I could somehow get access to the actual file system on the phone,
that'd be a great start and I could probably go from there on my own.
The OS itself is split in three parts, the low-level platform called
Gonk, the Gecko rendering engine and finally Gaia which includes the
user interface, standard application and all related code. I assume you
would be interested in modifying the latter. You can read about it here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/Platform/Gaia
I also encourage you to subscribe to the dev-gaia mailing list
([email protected]).
Gabriele
_______________________________________________
dev-b2g mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
