Comments on: Scripting in applications

By: Janne

Janne — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:23:34 +0000

It’s two complementary domains, I think. DBus-scripting (like AppleScript) is about automating control of software. This is good. Gnome should have this. In fact, why don’t we already have it? For a minimal implementation all you’d need is a decently simple to use wrapper around a set of Dbus-bindings for whatever scripting language you want to use along with some convenience functions for common Gnome apps and use cases (things like “stop all media from playing”, and “Mr. Spreadsheet, what’s the value of cell A4 in the ‘Page 2′ sheet?” without everyone having to figure out how to do that out on their own).

What people talk about now is implementing the internal logic of an application in a scripting language. This is also good. Emacs would not have become the bloated monstrosity^H^H^H^Hpowerful tool it is without it. We should have both.

By: Havoc

Havoc — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:25:27 +0000

fwiw I wasn’t really talking about third-party scripting, I was talking about implementing the app itself in an embedded scripting language.

The problem with Sawfish wasn’t really that it was in a scripting language; the problems included 1) it was a weird custom lisp, so a bit hard to figure out, 2) the emphasis on being a window manager construction kit instead of a window manager, i.e. emphasis on third party scripts and extensibility to the point of compromising the default behavior, and 3) the maintainer (a nice guy) went to work at Apple and there was missing maintenance.

You can very well write something in a scripting language without screwups like making config files be programs instead of data.

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:08:01 +0000

Wes: Are you saying the person implementing scripting should read up on all those before they implement it, or that I should read up on them to answer my questions or before I attempt to discuss it at all or just for general interest?

By: Jonathan Pryor

Jonathan Pryor — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:05:33 +0000

From a security/robustness perspective, an external scripting process + DBus to script apps makes the most sense, as if the scripting host dies it won’t take out scripted process.

(Though if the scripting host dies, this could possibly leave the scripted process in some unstable state, so this isn’t a panacea.)

Relying on DBus also allows for a variety of scripting languages — anything with DBus bindings could be used, including Python and C# as well as JavaScript, without requiring that the scripted process actually host those runtimes (which would increase memory use for all scripted apps, particularly since it’s rare that _all_ memory used by the host engine is sharable by all apps).

And if DBus can’t support this…why not? Win32 COM certainly can (allowing Windows Scripting Host to act as the scripting engine dejure to use VBScript or JScript to automate any COM-scriptable application).

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:05:09 +0000

You might want to read up on AppleScript, AppleEvents, OSA embedding, BeEvents, and Automator. I know that’s a lot to read, but scripting is a big topic.

By: Chris Parker

Chris Parker — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:49:06 +0000

KDE does this already, and it is really nice. I can script pretty much every part of my KDE desktop.