Aspects of Javascript

Posted on August 21st, 2007 by Phil

A problem that I come upon with Firefox Extension Development is that often it is close to impossible to find out, which object / function provided by Firefox is called when certain Events occur. For example: in spite of my all-day taking quest to find a central piece of code to detect changes of bookmarks I still don’t know exactly what functions are called when a Bookmark is created / deleted / changed1.

But thanks to Google and some Python background (Decorators) I found Beppu’s Decorator / AOP snippet for Javascript that is incredibly useful for finding out what exactly is happening without needing to alter Firefox’s source code2. This code allows to execute a script before or after some miscellaneous code is executed. Even wrapping a function is possible without any problem… check it out!

  1. note: this is not exactly true. There is the infamous DataSource "rdf:bookmarks" of Mozillas nsIRDFService. But recognizing exact acts seems to be too tedious to really start trying… So this approach stays my last resort! ↩

  2. doesn’t work for native XPCOM code, only for Javascript objects / functions. ↩

Tags: ffextdev, javascript // Add Comment »

Discussion Area - Leave a Comment




« »