Mozilla is putting together a core set of tools and recommendations that it considers the most useful for making Web apps and is asking for input from the developer community.

The idea of making "strong informed recommendations" available on the Mozilla Developer Network comes from Fred Wenzel who manages the Apps Engineering team at Mozilla, which focuses on simplifying the development of HTML5 apps for developers.

He outlines the motivation for this initiative in a thread on the Mozilla Developers mailing list:

For developers, building apps on the Web platform can pose a fragmentation problem: For every development concern, there are often a dozen or more possible options to consider, without clear pros or cons. Web developers can feel intimidated not simply by their choices, but by how _similar_ their choices are.

However, by making strong, informed recommendations to developers, we can help turn the variety of development tools available on the Web from a daunting proposition into an empowering one.

According to a post from Robert Nyman and Frederic Wenzel on the Mozilla Hack blog:

The upcoming, initial set of recommendations involves a toolchain that’s core to any modern web app, like a JavaScript framework, templating interface, UI framework and task runner. We will employ existing solutions wherever possible and write libraries or utilities to fill in the gaps.

They also spell out what they are looking for in recommended tools:

• Sufficiently well-documented and straightforward to use for an average developer (we will concisely document the required knowledge one needs in order to engage with the technology).
• Loosely coupled and as modular as possible (so you can follow one recommendation but not another if you are so inclined)
• Tested on Mozilla products (i.e. the UI components will perform well on Firefox OS, etc), but with cross-platform apps in mind
  

 

The initiative is intended to save reinventing the wheel and if you want to be involved in selecting tools and practices to be included, see Wenzel's thread or have your say on Mozilla's dev-webapps forum or in #apps on irc.mozilla.org.

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