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Exploring the Mac OS X Object System

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the a-deep-look-into-it dept.

Philippe writes "F-Script is an integrated set of tools that makes it possible to interactively explore and manipulate Cocoa objects as well as script them using new high-level programming techniques. This new article, Exploring Cocoa with F-Script, shows you how to use some of its most impressive features and demonstrates how it can be a useful addition to your developer toolkit."

8 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. PyObjC? by Fiznarp · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've seen Cocoa scripted with PyObjC and python Cocoa bindings.

    Apple currently employs one of the maintainers of PyObjC.

    Would someone informed care to explain if/when F-Script would be a better choice?

    1. Re:PyObjC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      F-Script can be attached to a running application. F-Script has been around since NextStep and before Python existed. Any other questions?

    2. Re:PyObjC? by Bastian · · Score: 4, Informative

      I've been using F-Script for a while now; it's solid, it plays very nicely with Cocoa, and includes a lot of nice time-saving syntactic sugar. Its syntax is also simple enough that I can use it for an application scripting language that users can pick up in a few minutes. The F-Script pallette for IB is also rather convenient; it means I can throw a debugging (or scripting) console into any app of mine with almost zero effort.

      I don't really care if an Apple employee is working on one but not the other; F-Script is mature enough that it's not like I need to be afraid that the project will be orphaned before it's completed or anything like that. Nor do I care if Apple has blessed PyObjC or not. Apple also put scads of time and money into what I had always heard was a rather hacked Cocoa-Java bridge, only to essentially orphan it a year ago. And dare I mention AppleScript?

      I haven't tried PyObjC, so I can't tell you if F-Script is a better choice or not, all I know is that it's a good choice. So I'll turn the question around - what makes PyObjC a better choice?

    3. Re:PyObjC? by Bastian · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Right, which is a huge advantage of F-Script over what I've seen of PyObjC. The only major difference between passing a message in F-Script and passing one in ObjC is that I use parentheses instead of square brackets. PyObjC has to go through some rather unnatural contortions in order to do the same, and it kind of made the code hurt my eyes a little bit, and I could see where it could make reading others' code a bit confusing.

      I'm also wondering, does PyObjC have "tab completion" for code the way the built-in F-Script console does? I've gotten really used to that in XCode; Python would have to be a damn sight better than F-Script for the switch to it to accelerate my coding more than the loss of Code Sense-style symbol completion would slow it down.

  2. How many? by andrewman327 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was wondering how many Mac-specific development platforms are out there. Obviously there are loads of them for Windows, but how many just for Mac?

    As much as this will get me flamed, I code in Java when I am writing applications for Mac. I find it works well enough, but I am interested in becoming a bit more versitile.

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    1. Re:How many? by quadelirus · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you mean development frameworks then Cocoa is the way to go. Carbon is older and mostly included for backwards compatibility. Cocoa is the new hotness. As far as IDE's go, I use XCode2 and InterfaceBuilder. They are easy to use once you know where things are. I wish they had some sort of tabbed editor and I would reccomend dual monitors while developing due to the number of windows you will have open, but other than that it is a great product.

      A couple of notes:

      I, like you, come from a Java background and have recently begun to write native Mac apps. I use XCode and InterfaceBuilder and they work together really well to write Cocoa apps very quickly. I decided to learn Objective-C because for some reason I thought it would be idea to know yet another language, but Java-Cocoa should work just as well.

      I'm not sure if this is the same for Java-Cocoa, but in Objective-C/Cocoa the hardest thing for me to get used to was the graphical nature of the programming. In many languages you have API's that allow you to do things like Hello World programs and/or more complex programs like a simple browser without writing a line of code. You design the interface graphically and hit run and it works. The difference between most of those (for isntance JBuilder) and Cocoa development is that in JBuilder, even if you don't physically write the interface code, it gets coded to your class file as standard Java code. In cocoa this isn't the case. The interface is housed in a file called a NIB file. Your average programmer will probably not ever have to look directly at the contents of a NIB. Also connections between classes is created graphically. For instance, if you want to have a button do something when it is clicked you don't add an onclick listener anywhere in the code. Instead you have a special type of method in your controller class that handles actions and then in interface builder you control click on the button and drag it to the instance of your class and tell it to connect to the action. AFAIK, this MUST be done graphically. It can't be coded. Or at least, it is strongly discouraged. This graphical nature took me quite awhile to get used to.

  3. Cringely? by Jerk+City+Troll · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is that you?

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  4. Bzzt. Wrong. by wandazulu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Um...have you done any programming on the mac, AC? Carbon is the cleaned up legacy API of the pre-OSX days. The idea was that you wrote to Carbon when developing your OS9 app, and then it should pretty much run unmodified in OS X (presuming a recompile to make it OS X native lest your app fire up the classic layer).

    In that regard, Carbon is meant to run on other platforms only if you consider OS9 another platform. I think you are thinking that Objective C is somehow a bastardized version of C. It's not; Objective C is the full C language with additional object-oriented components a la C++, but not to the extreme that C++ takes it. Plus, Objective C gives you run time typing, which C++ does not provide (static, compile-time typing). This makes it very easy to get information about objects and is the basis of the key-value system that runs most of Cocoa. Objective C is inspired by Smalltalk and uses a number of its concepts whilst C++ was influenced heavily on Simula2 (I'm pretty sure). Regardless, both can call strncpy(), malloc() etc. if you want.

    If you want write truly cross-platform C, you write to the standard C API *only* and let the users get their input and output via stdin and stdout. Not very graphical, but hey, you want cross platform, right?