Accessing Thunderbird

Hi everyone!

I'm working on an academic project where I need to read data from
Thunderbird/Lightning such as contacts, events, todos but also which
folder is currently selected and so on.
The application will be written in java so my first guess was to take a
look at JavaXPCOM to access the Thunderbird/Lightning components. I've
used a similar approach for MS Outlook where it is very easy to access
the outlook object-model via a java-COM-bridge.
Unfortunately I could not find any example code or documentation that
describes how to access the Thunderbird/Lightning components with
JavaXPCOM. Now I'm not sure if using JavaXPCOM is the right approach
anyway for my requirements. Would it be more appropriate to write a
Thunderbird-extension that contacts java and sends the required
information than calling XPCOM from java ?

It would be very helpful if someone could point me in the right
direction... ;-).

Regards
 Christian