Into the unknown
Into the unknown
- Subject: Into the unknown
- From: "Wallace, William" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 12:46:54 -0600
- Thread-topic: Into the unknown
I'm embarking on a new project that could lead into Applescripting regions that I've never been before and I would appreciate any feedback or advice about whether I'm thinking of this in the best way.
First, a little background. I have a script that prints Quark files to postscript then distills them to PDF according to various specs. Rather than installing this script (and all the necessary software that the script relies on) onto every machine in the production department and tying up the production editor's machine while all this stuff runs (not to mention having to troubleshoot a slew of different machines when things start to go awry - and they will), my idea is to have one script on one machine which the production folk can connect to over the network and run an "initiator" script which will gather all the pertinent data from them (username, network password, job specs, location of the Quark file to be PDFd, etc.) and then write that info to a queue (which will be just a plain text file) that will then be read periodically by the master PDFing script which turns around and postscripts and distills everything, then emails the appropriate user to tell them where they can pick up their PDFs.
My question is this: is this the best way to go about this? The reason I opted for writing the job info to a text file queue is that it should be fairly trivial (I think) to verify that the text file is not currently open and in use and thus only one job will be written to or read from the queue at a time. And because the initiator script does not interact directly with the master script then there shouldn't ever be an issue of one job overriding another or different initiators fighting for the attention of the master script. Is there a more elegant solution to this? Has anyone else implemented such a scheme and were there unforeseen pitfalls that I should be wary of? This is all running in MacOS 9.2.2 with AS 1.8.3. My scheme does rely on a couple of third party OSAXen so I am not against investigating other 3rd party components, however my budget is nil. I either have to work with what I have or find a freeware solution.
-B!ll
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