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Re: How to update an applescript app from a remote server?
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Re: How to update an applescript app from a remote server?


  • Subject: Re: How to update an applescript app from a remote server?
  • From: has <email@hidden>
  • Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 19:55:42 +0000

Takaaki Naganoya wrote:

 >> How do you guys normally update applescript applications ?

I know some script librarian project. They updates their parts via web
servers.

--Script Runner
http://www.h5.dion.ne.jp/~maclab/script/script-Runner.html

--Has's appleMods project
http://applemods.sourceforge.net/

I can't speak for Script Runner, but AFAIK AppleMods doesn't currently provide any kind of auto-download/update mechanism; all libraries must be downloaded and installed manually.


Also, a correction: AppleMods is actually Gary Wood's project, not mine, so the credit here should be his. While I was slated to run AM at one point, that plan fell through and I turned the whole project over to Gary in autumn 2003. The AM site is entirely his own work and he's also the current maintainer for the core libraries that I originally wrote, so except for some vague promises to finish the Loader documentation and providing the odd bit of free PR when posting code solutions on the AS mailing lists and forums I no longer have any connection to it.


But it is difficult to understand how the library works.

Getting OT here... but the basic concept is really very simple: libraries perform exactly the same role as osaxen, providing scripters with collections of ready-made commands for performing common tasks. In AppleScript, there's some slight technical differences between osaxen and libraries:


1. osaxen are written in C and libraries in AppleScript, so differ slightly in syntax, speed, functionality and ease of development and use

2. osax commands are imported into AppleScript's global namespace whereas a library's commands remain within the library's own namespace, so they're called in slightly different ways, e.g.:

	set x to someCommand

versus:

	set x to someCommand of someLibrary

But don't let this distract you: their actual purpose is exactly the same - to save you time and work.

i.e. Libraries rock because they can greatly reduce the amount of code you need to write yourself if you can simply reuse existing code that's already been written, tested, documented and debugged. This saves scripters and programmers an almost unimaginable amount of time and effort: instead of always writing their own routines to perform common tasks - finding and replacing text in a string, parsing XML, performing complex math operations, drawing GUI windows and icons, reading and writing data on disk, and so on - 99 times out of 100 they can just use a bunch of pre-existing ones. Instead of writing many thousands - even millions - of lines of code to construct a moderately complex program, you might only need to write a few hundred yourself, with the rest coming from pre-existing libraries.

This is why libraries are virtually ubiquitous in just about every other mainstream language; for example, take a look at Perl's CPAN archive or ObjC's Cocoa frameworks to see just how much incredibly useful functionality - millions of man-hours' worth, in fact - you can obtain for virtually zero effort. Just download, install and read the documentation so you know how to use them; and away you go. As to why the situation in AppleScript is so poor by comparison; well that's another question... but I ain't going there today. ;)

HTH

has
http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/
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