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Mobile Game Applications Need Scripting Too

Posted by Hemos on from the and-naughty-girls-need-love-too dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mobile game developer Tom Park believes that scripting for wireless devices is important for proficiency sake. And with the need to scale mobile applications across so many different platforms, proficiency is everything. Read his thoughts on scripting, as well as his ideas on wireless application development's future."

5 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. All applications need scripting.... by wowbagger · · Score: 5, Informative

    All applications need scripting, scripting needs to be cross-application (one script controlling more than one app) and that scripting needs to be available to the common user if they wish to use it.

    This is one of the areas where I feel Windows fell down on the job - while COM allows all applications to make their functionality available to scripting languages, Windows does not provide a default scripting language that is universally available. Yes, Visual Basic will script things, but it is not a default part of a standard Windows install.

    DOS had scripting of a sort (batch files), and people used that feature. However, DOS could not script every application, and batch files were missing key elements needed to make them anything more than linear sequences of commands. (Yes, batch files did have IF, GOTO, and so on, but try looping over a set of files, or taking the output of one file and using it on the command line of another file).

    Unix has many scripting languages available to it (Perl, Python, TCL, in addition to bash, tch, et. al.), and at least one of them will usually be installed by default on a modern system. They can script command line apps like nobody's business, but unfortunately the more modern GUI apps provide much less scriptablity. CORBA and Kparts might help this if they were more commonly available. This is an area Unix-like environments (including MacOS) need to really improve in.

    Granted, J. Random User may not want to get his hands dirty writing scripts, but think about it - if you, the person JRU turns to for help, could KNOW that scripts were available, how much better you could help the poor guy out.

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    1. Re:All applications need scripting.... by fireboy1919 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I think you're forgetting about a language.

      Windows can be scripted with Jscript or VBScript using WSH (Windows scripting host). Jscript is very, very similar to javascript (I think that javascript may actually be a subset of jscript), which is universally available.

      As far as being "a part of the standard Windows install," I suspect it depends upon your version of Windows. I know it comes with W2k, and doesn't with Windows 98, but I can't speak for the rest.

      Still, I'm not sure that this is a good thing. Windows doesn't insulate itself against scripting attacks very well at all by running parts as different users. So anyone with WSH installed could be in for a world of hurt if a bad script comes along in viral form.

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      Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
    2. Re:All applications need scripting.... by mattkime · · Score: 2, Informative

      This is an area Unix-like environments (including MacOS) need to really improve in.

      Actually, I'd like to make the argument that Mac OS X has a perfectly good scripting environment for its GUI apps - AppleScript.

      Yes, apps do need to support AppleScript on an individual basis. All AppleScript apps can speak between each other. And with Apple's recent addition of the AppleScript Studio, the script itself can have a GUI interface as well.

      The thing that is difficult about adding a scripting language to a GUI is that your interface changes quite a bit. Components of the app need to be accessible as objects whereas most command line scripting passes around text.

      For anyone who wants to complain about the AppleScript language itself, its features can be accessed from your favorite scripting language - I believe python and perl are already available.

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      Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
  2. Re:Pointless layers of emulation by patniemeyer · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm not going to argue about specific cell phone implementations, but let me just point out that Java was *designed* to run on cell phones.

    People used to complain that Java was too slow for all sorts of applications... Have you noticed that they have been very quiet for the past few years? It's all about getting a good VM wedged into the device.

    BeanShell is not the fastest implementation possible, but it does internally compile and perform many optimizations. It should be fast enough for a lot of applications to use it effectively.

    Thanks,
    Pat Niemeyer

  3. Re:BeanShell in Emacs ... or Erlang for wireless by mlk · · Score: 2, Informative

    It comes with the JDEE.

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    Wow, I should not post when knackered.