Thunderbird addons (the XPI files) are actually just zip packages with all the code in them. there is no compilation step necessary. If you want to play around, a text editor and a zip utility are all you need.

In order to develop and also be able to run tests and use the build tools you need some extra software:

• git (see gitbhub for info how to use it https://help.github.com/articles/set-up-git )
• Apache ANT (this is for the build system) fom http://ant.apache.org/

Alternatively you can just use eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/  ) - classic or jee should both work fine. Ant and GIT (eGIT) should work out of the box then.

The code is in the github available in https://github.com/corinis/synckolab

git clone git://github.com/corinis/synckolab.git

Once you got the code, change in the synckolab folder. There you will find a "build.xml" which is the ant build information file. 

Now you can simply run:

• "ant test": this will run the tests. you should see a "OK" then all tests were successfull
• "ant": this will generate synckolab-X.Y.Z.xpi file in the base folder which you can install in thunderbird
  

Just run ant and the build script will create the xpi for you.

To do that it will:

• create a jar from everything src/chrome (where the actual code is located)
• creat an xpi with the content of src incl. the jar