Hi, not too sure if Web Development is the right place for this but anyway:
I've never done any web development and I have never created a Firefox extension either but here's the thing:
I am making a project for myself, a Java (not JavaScript!!!) program that can add, change and search for food recipes in a SQL database. Since many recipes are found online, I'd like a quick and effective way to swiftly add a recipe to my database. I haven't really figured out a good idea how to do this in the best way though, I'd preferably have it as automatic as possible but anyway, there will be a whole bunch of things required, to format the text and to look for ingredients/tags in the recipe and all that that will be done in a Java program.
So what I want to do is pretty much this (unless any better ideas!!!):
1)First I want to select/mark a text available on a webpage, for example the ingredient list or description/title.
2) I CTRL+RightClick and the Firefox plugin will go like "Creating new recipe..." and bring up the usual menu (copy, paste, and all that) but with additional features like "Add title", "Add description". The information needs to somehow be reachable by the Java program so maybe it will copy paste the info (such as the recipe title "Asparagus with hollandaise") to temporary text files that Java will later access.
3) In the end, I'll click like "Add recipe to database" and I want the Firefox extension to run/open a Java program that will extract the data so that it can do it's thing, such as formatting and adding it to the database.
There is much information on the web regarding creating extensions and I suppose I'll have to follow some of them but I am not too interested in learning a bunch of "unnecessary" stuff. It's all too general for me to just dive straight in without knowing more about what I am actually looking for so I am here to ask:
This should be a fairly easy extension to create right? Anyway, how would you go about doing this? More specifically what should I focus on (what languages etc?) and is there any specific parts of the language that I should focus on (any useful method, function, technique to achieve my goal etc..). As mentioned, there's so much general information out there, I need to somehow streamline it all so that I don't waste time on learning stuff not relevant to this project!