AppleScript for System Admins WebCast

Justin Elliott writes "Watch Apple Computer's own AppleScript wizard, Sal Soghoian, present 'AppleScript For System Admins' during Mac OS X Labs' September 24 webcast. Learn about essential AppleScript tools and tips under Mac OS X. Discover how AppleScript can be used for administrative tasks, and how to use AppleScript to effectively interact with the Mac OS X file system."

Comments

Re:Don' Like AS

[skinfitz]

Good point - I remember on one of the admin lists some guy obviously from an OS9 background was having problems moving files around with Apple Script. I introduced him to shell scripting - turns out he had about 30 lines of code to essentially do some basic file copying and moving. I showed him he could do the same thing in about 3 lines of shell script.

You have to be careful with shell scripts on the Mac filing system though - you can end up losing the resource forks which breaks some files.

Not available until next week

[Corvus9]

Note that this site only contains connection information for a stream of a live presentation that will be performed on Sep. 24, 2003.

You can download the webcast software, but will not be able to connect or see anything until 1 PM EDT next wednesday.

Re:Don' Like AS

[Meowing]

Where are the shell scripts?

What did you want to do from the shell? Some programs are designed to be used from a command line in the Unix way, others are happier being controlled via the GUI and OSA [which you can still get to from the shell using open(1) and osascript(1)]. Those commands won't completely eliminate Applescript, but they will let you stick mostly to sh and only bring in OSA where the target program demands it.

I like AppleScript, but...

[supton]

I wonder sometimes what Apple doesn't gradually dump AppleScript for Python? Think about it: it would give them a scripting platform as powerful as powerful as Java, but (nearly) as simple as AppleScript (perhaps more readable, and certainly more maintainable). Python 2.3 is going to get bundled with Panther, and is used in some core "essential functionality" in Panther and already has bindings to pretty much everything one would needs to tightly stitch to Apple's platform (ojbc, quartz, Java apps via JPE, etc).

Re:I like AppleScript, but...

[gerardrj]

Or for that matter, why not Perl. If you co scan CPAN you'll see Perl modules that will connect you in to most of the useful parts of OS X.

It's simple really: Apple prefers to do things in house where they have control. They don't have to fight with anyone or any standards body to revise or extent Applescript.

I can certainly see AppleScript going away in a few more revisions of the OS. With Project Builder so simple to use, Apple may just decide that actual binary programs are so easy to create that AppleScript is just no longer necessary.

Remember... Applescript was developed as a fast and easy way for people to manage small tasks without the drudgery of writing in C. In Project Builder you nary need a line of code, just drag, drop and fill in the blanks, thus eliminating the drugery.

Re:I like AppleScript, but...

[scrotch]

Serious question:
Can Python (or Perl, or anything else) interact with other running OS X programs?

That's why we've used Applescript with OS 9 so much. We can write scripts that tell Quark XPress what to do. We can pull info from FileMaker and format it and place it in Quark auto-magicly. We've written scripts that manipulate text in Quark text boxes without ever leaving Quark - like they're just another menu item. We can do similar things with Outlook Express and BBEdit and any number of other apps. I've written a bunch of Applescripts, but very few that didn't interact with at least one commercial application.

Now if I can replace
FileMaker <- Applescript -> Quark
with
MySQL <- Python/Perl/etc -> Quark
that would seriously rock. Are you saying I can do that? Can you post a link to some info on getting started?

Re:I like AppleScript, but...

[SandSpider]

You don't really need to replace AppleScript with python, per se. The ability to call Apple Events is within the ability of many scripting languages on the Mac. You can also call AppleScripts from anything that can run a program via the command line, and you can send out command line tasks through Applescripts. It's a pretty useful technique to mix Applescripts with shell scripts based on their relative strength. And, yes, Applescript has the ability to do things easily in its language that other languages can't do as easily, and those things were designed to work well with the sort of tasks that mac scripters would need.

The main problem is that the dictionaries for the various applications's Apple Events are geared towards Applescript (if, indeed, they are geared towards anything at all. Most dictionaries thoroughly suck). If you want to make the calls from another language, you kind of have to figure out how the event calls work, but that's not a significantly more difficult task than in AppleScript, for reasons labelled above.

The trickiest thing to do in Python instead of AppleScript would be making a Cocoa Application with it. AppleScript has AppleScript Studio, which will let you make a full, ableit slow, Cocoa Application, with logic being done in Applescript. You can include and call Objective C and Java Methods from these scripts, so if you wanted to use existing code and/or optimize some often run code, you could do that without too much trouble. It also gives you access to the entire OS framework within AppleScript, so you could make Rendezvous aware services without having to know much about Objective-C. I suspect you could use Python or Perl this way, but it might be some work getting it set up.

From a practical perspective, I like to use whatever is handiest at the time. So, for example, if you needed to get a list of files from a web site, you could easily do

set theString to do shell script "curl -l -s ftp://username:password@someftp.com/ | grep 'unique identifier string'"

That could just as easily have been a one-line perl script or even a call to a script. The trickiest about passing generic scripts as a text block is making sure the text is quoted properly, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

As far as going the other way around, and calling apple events from a shell script, I forget how to do this. There are libraries for Perl and Python that will let you do it, and you just use those functions or methods to call the Apple Events and pass the proper parameters. Here's an example for MacPerl. In any case, Google is a good tool for finding that sort of information.

=Brian