Re: scripting on macs in general
Re: scripting on macs in general
- Subject: Re: scripting on macs in general
- From: garbanzito <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 13:41:15 -0600
at 2002 07 15, 09:33 -0500, they whom i call Ian Bruce wrote:
I am new to applescript but have done software for a few decades...........
I see AS panned a bit in the lists and wonder if it is not possible
that a more general language might not work as well. Are the
interfaces to Java, etc. adequate to do all the things that one can
do in AS? What are the relative merits and limitations?
several other languages can do what AppleScript does best --
send messages (known as AppleEvents) to existing
applications in order to gain leverage from their
off-the-shelf capabilities.
however, AFAIK, almost all of these other languages cannot
transparently reference the terminology of other
applications (scripting dictionaries). instead, you'll have
to use special tools to "import" the dictionaries of the
target applications into the development environment you
plan to use. the dictionaries of certain applications are
readily available "pre-imported" for some development
environments (such as Frontier's) but for the general case,
this terminology barrier can be quite imposing.
after you cross that hurdle, you'll have to see how easily
the language in question can use the terminology and the
object model (data structures) presented by the target
applications. AppleScript, Frontier, and JavaScript OSA (i
think) have syntactic sugar which makes this much simpler
than it would be with the raw AppleEvents codes which many
languages must send. (anyone familiar with other languages
which syntactically accommodate AppleEvents and object
models?)
i believe there are ongoing projects to improve this
situation, particularly with perl, python, Ruby, and maybe
others (anyone familiar with these please chime in), but
it's still rough going. usually it's easier to create a
simple interface between AppleScript code where needed and
code in whatever other language you want to use. there are
various interesting ways to do this, particularly using the
shell as an intermediary or via XML-RPC or SOAP.
It seems at a glance hard to deal with dialog boxes in AS. Is that true?
it's easy to deal with fairly limited dialog boxes. if you
want to create a full-blown user interface, check out
AppleScript Studio.
--
steve harley email@hidden
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