Re: Apple scripting extensions (Was: Re: kind of unit testing framework for StepTalk)

[Helge Hess]

On Apr 20, 2004, at 10:56 PM, Stefan Urbanek wrote:
> On 2004-04-20 12:02:04 +0200 Helge Hess <helge.hess@opengroupware.org> 
> wrote:
> > Hi Stefan,
> > did you ever consider using the Foundation scripting extensions done 
> > by Apple for StepTalk?
> Yes, I have thought about that... however, GNUstep does not provide 
> them at the moment.

I think it is a good approach to implement them in StepTalk (or some 
other outside framework) first and if done, move them to base (if 
people agree to that).

> > While a few things are obviously AppleScript specific, a lot of 
> > things seem to be rather generic and might be suitable for a lot of 
> > scripting languages.
> You are right. Moreover, it can be suitable not only for lot of 
> scripting languages but for more other usages as well! Most of classes 
> and additions that Apple calls 'scripting *' are rather meta-data, or 
> explicit information about objects for third parties.

I'm thinking more about the real scripting things like the coercion 
handler. All the metadata stuff is really EOF, and I'm pretty sure that 
AppleScript methods would clash with EOF ones.

> Another usage than scripting? Imagine a modelling language that 
> describes a network of objects. It can use class descriptions or other 
> information to provide outlets for connecting objects. It's not 
> scripting, it is modelling...either simulation models, models 
> functional blocks describing a data-processing filter, ... even Gorm 
> can use that.

Yes, Cocoa bindings are also in that category, not sure whether Gorm 
already supports that. Basically EOF without the database stuff.
Notably IB has special support for both, AppleScript and bindings.

> It is not very encouraging if developers have to maintain information 
> about same thing on different places (myclass.h, myclass.m, 
> myclasssuite.scripSuite,...).

Hm, well, IMHO metadata belongs in different places, after all thats 
why it is called metadata ;-) If you want to have everything in one 
place, you probably need a different language (like C# which supports 
that, eh Objective-C# ;-).

> p.s.: Before talking about -base bloat, please try to replace the word 
> 'scripting' with 'meta-data' to get different point of view :-) 
> Classes tell about object's behaviour, 'scripting descriptions' tell 
> about application's behaviour.

Well, IMHO we should use the word 'scripting' because thats what I want 
;-) And personally I'm only interested in something which is compatible 
with Cocoa Foundation.
The hard part is probably to rip out the AppleScript dependencies.

Greets
  Helge
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