The Pain of Building a Gmail Chrome Extension

http://blog.inboxhooks.com/86999859

by kirubakaran • 15 years ago

20 6 15 years ago

blog.inboxhooks.com

eli• 15 years ago

Well.... I'm pretty sure Google doesn't want you doing that, so it's no surprise they didn't make it easy (and perhaps even went out of their way to make it hard)

dividuum• 15 years ago

Do you know the greasemonkey API gmail provides? Maybe it solves some of your problems: http://code.google.com/p/gmail-greasemonkey/wiki/GmailGrease...

I just poked around: there seems to be a 2.0 API.

In the web inspector console on any open gmail page:

  > gmonkey.info("2.0")
  "The "gmonkey" module is not officially supported and is subject 
  to change, we will support previous versions for at least 1-month.  
  Use gmonkey.load(v, callback) to load in the full API where v is 
  the version number of the API you want passed to calback.  Latest 
  set of the bindings is "2.0".  kthxbye"

nicholasreed2• 15 years ago

GmailGreasemonkey is definitely useful to any Gmail extension developer. Unfortunately there really isn't much discussion happening around updates and you end up running into little problems such as ready().

wikyd• 15 years ago

How does Baydin's Boomerang handle these complexities?

nicholasreed2• 15 years ago

They don't seem to be using GMonkey at all. The source for their plugin is at https://b4g.baydin.com/site_media/bookmarklet/b4g_bookmarkle...

allenc• 15 years ago

Couldn't comment on the blog itself, but Gmail simply uses Google Closure and its compiler to get minified Javascript + DOM.

And it so happens that Closure code tends to create a ton of extra DOM structure within the JS code, so the 50-level-deep <div> tree isn't much of a surprise, especially with something as complex as the Gmail UI.

The Pain of Building a Gmail Chrome Extension

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