zipwriter on Oxymoronical

ZipWriter is Here!

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:04:11 +0000

Yes, finally after months of twiddling my thumbs waiting for approval to land the zipwriter component has gone into trunk, and is enabled for all applications (some apps might need to add the interface to their packages list). If you want to use check out the interface, it’s fairly well documented I think. That magic contract ID you need is “@mozilla.org/zipwriter;1”.

It’s been quite a long process both writing the code, getting reviewed and getting agreement for it to appear in Firefox so I hope all you extension authors and application developers are going to make good use out of it in your projects. Let me know what you come up with.

Zip Writer Goodness

Fri, 04 May 2007 22:59:27 +0000

I can’t believe it’s been over a month since I wrote something here. Well I kinda can, lots of hectic stuff going on at my work right now which has been making finding time for Mozilla stuff tricky. Hopefully not for much longer.

I’m glad to say that I have managed to make great progress on the zip writer component. I have decided that dealing with multiple platform compiles for Nightly Tester Tools is just a bad idea, so instead I have pushed on with submitting the zip writer to Mozilla for review. Hopefully that will make it into tree where I (and of course anyone else) can just use it. There’s been a bunch of changes between the version I posted earlier and that that’s gone up for review, not least of which is a set of testcases that have made sure I didn’t break the old by making some clean-ups.

Zip Writer Update

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:06:05 +0000

I spent some more time this weekend hacking on my Zip Writer component. It’s now pretty capable. It can open existing zip files and remove entries and append to them, happily rewriting the headers and everything exactly as it encountered them. And the other major win is that I have deflate code up and running which makes compression possible.

All this has allowed me to reintroduce making extensions compatible during the install process in a far safer way than was the case before. NTT can now watch the EM datasource, spot that an extension has finished being downloaded, then open that extension’s xpi file and if necessary rewrite the metedata to claim compatibility with the current version of whatever app you happen to be running in.

Zip Writer

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

One of the annoying omissions from the Mozilla platform has always been the inability to create a zip file. It’s been bugging me for some time since it’s the only way for Nightly Tester Tools to properly manage overriding compatibility for an individual extension install, without doing dangerous things like it used to. There’s been a Google Summer of Code project on creating such functionality but it didn’t get all that far.