Automated Testing for Chrome Extension

Since I have migrated the extension of Simple Gmail Notes as an official side project of the new company , I would like to keep a more rigid development process of this.

Very soon, the extension would need to support 4 different environments, it would be run for:

  1. Chrome + Gmail
  2. Firefox + Gmail
  3. Chrome + Google Inbox
  4. Firefox + Google Inbox

Read more Automated Testing for Chrome Extension

Mobile Apps – Native, Hybrid, and HTML5 – A More Comprehensive Review

Say, your own a small team of capable programmers, and you need to build an an mobile app across two platforms (iOS and Android), what would be your best bet?

Currently, there are a lot of different ways to do that, and that's exactly the biggest problem to many people. If we have no other choices, then we would simply build one iOS app and build one android app, without thinking too much. Unfortunately, that's not the case today. We have a lot of different choices now, in fact, we have too many choices.

Read more Mobile Apps – Native, Hybrid, and HTML5 – A More Comprehensive Review

Git vs SVN

There are so many comparisons of Git vs SVN outside, but as far as I can tell, 99% of them are biased. (And so is this one, probably.)

And there are many Git tutorials outside, and none is clear enough so others could get on hand easily. In fact, it remains to be one of the major drawbacks of Git.

I have used SVN for many years, and used Git for quite a while now. I admit that I am not yet an expert of Git, but I have tried and suffered a number of traps of Git, and I learned a lot from those painful experiences. Some of the traps could get me stuck for one day.

Read more Git vs SVN

Docker Basics

By the Aliyun conference of 2015, I saw a lot of news about docker. And it's the third time of the year that I heard about docker.

I was lucky enough to have some quick conversations with the docker developers there, and I found that it's really mature now. In fact, TaoBao also used docker for the internal deployment procedures, so I decided to try to move some projects of our company into the world of docker.

Read more Docker Basics

The Review Mechanism of Firefox Extension

Now, after 5 months of development for Firefox extension of Simple Gmail Notes, most features are stabilized and the features could be shared between Chrome and Firefox easily. In the last few revisions, the cross-browser migration (Firefox -> Chrome or Chrome -> Firefox) all took less than 1 hour. Basically, the initial pain on the development of extension development gradually passed away.

However, I would like to further discuss the review process of Firefox. As mentioned before, Firefox uses a manual review process, it is much more strict than Google Chrome extensions (which is, basically, nil).

Read more The Review Mechanism of Firefox Extension