Thursday, June 5, 2014

MozRepl

One of the recurring problems I have with Mozilla products is that they are essentially unscriptable using technology I know how to use. XPCOM has no Perl support (apparently it started to, at one time, but that module seems to have been dropped along the way), and the only real recourse appears to be embedding of JavaScript through mechanisms I don't really have the time to understand.

Well - no more. I learned of the existence of MozRepl, which is a plugin that provides a local telnet command line that can be used to inject JS into running Mozilla-based applications (Firefox and Thunderbird being the ones I actually care about). And MozRepl does have a Perl module to talk to it.

So that's another option I have for automating my work. I'm not 100% sure yet how best to use it, but at least I know it's there.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

docopt

At docopt.org - a specification language for command-line interfaces. Shades of ... that groovy Perl module I can't remember the name of. Right - Getopt::Euclid! I used it for the Marpa tester. Shades of that! Except a general specification language. I think I'll steal this idea eventually.