Jetpack Survey Report

Survey 1 – “Jetpack-based Add-on Development”

Over the past few weeks we have posted two surveys in effort to understand the add-on developer community more completely. The results for the first survey are in and we are ready to share them with the community. In this survey we wanted to find out what level of familiarity you had with Jetpack and what you feel we need to work on to ensure that Jetpack meets the needs of developers. Let’s dive in and take a look at what you had to say about “Jetpack-based Add-on Development” –

Which of the following are you comfortable using?

Not surprisingly, XUL ranked far lower in the area developer comfort when compared to the three mainstays of client-side development – HTML, CSS, and JS

Are you interested in developing Firefox Add-ons with the Jetpack SDK?

There was overwhelming interest in Jetpack as an add-on development platform. This is good to see, and we expect that as more and more APIs are released, the Jetpack story will become even more interesting to developers looking to produce Firefox add-ons.

Have you created an add-on using the Jetpack SDK?

The number of you who have created add-ons with Jetpack was the near inverse of those who expressed interest in Jetpack. This disparity is likely due to the gaps in API and feature coverage of the Jetpack SDK. Again, this number is likely to increase as the SDK’s API set expands to cover most add-on developer use cases. We are not far from this level of API coverage, over the next 2-3 releases you should find that the majority of add-on development needs are accounted for in the Jetpack SDK.

A few common thoughts from the community

This chart shows some of the more common needs that surfaced in the qualitative answer section of the survey. API coverage and a quality web-based IDE for the Jetpack SDK topped the list. Having more documentation for the SDK was also a priority for those who responded.