On Jan 11, 2010, at 12:33 PM, has wrote:
> jonathan@mugginsoft wrote:
>
>>> Where have the Apple Event Manager Reference docs gone on developer.apple.com? I'm having trouble finding them.
>>
>>
>> Can't help with online location but in xcode 3.2 the AEM and the OSA docs are now in the separate OS X legacy library.
>
> Saywhut? That makes no sense, and is more than a little disturbing.
>
> If I look on the Legacy [1] section of the dev site, I see "View legacy documents, including technologies, features, products, APIs, and programming techniques that are no longer supported or that have been superseded." (And only one document on Xcode actually appears there.)
>
> And if I look on the IAC section [2], I see various AEM-related Carbon docs; just not the AEM (and OSA) API references themselves.
>
> Chris Nebel/Chris Page: please could you clarify the status of the AEM (and OSA) APIs and their documentation at your earliest convenience.
Yeah, I'm not real wild about that placement myself, but it's kind of a policy thing. In general, it's presumed that you're writing code in Objective-C and Cocoa these days, and APIs that have Cocoa replacements have all been moved to the "legacy" section to avoid distracting developers. The old AEM and OSA calls have been "superseded" by the Objective-C classes NSAppleEventDescriptor and NSAppleScript, respectively, and if you look for those in the IAC (non-legacy) section, you'll find them. However, "superseded" here comes with some big qualifications:
- The old APIs are still around and are still perfectly well supported. (In fact, the classes are implemented using them.)
- The classes cover the most common uses of the old APIs, but definitely not everything, most notably AESend and pretty much anything other than the most straightforward uses of OSA.
Practical upshot: use the Objective-C APIs if you can; they're a lot simpler to use if you're already working in Objective-C. If they don't do what you need (or if you're using straight C for some reason), feel free to use the old-school AEM and OSA directly; there are no plans to remove them.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
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