Re. [Pythonmac-SIG] talkingpanda installer - PyObjC experience

[has]

Bob wrote:

>  I'm also thinking that I should put some more work into aeve, 
>because it's much better suited for *receiving* and *sending* apple 
>events than appscript is

Yeah, appscript's basically been a one-trick pony to-date, and while 
it's very application scripter-friendly it's a bit of a non-starter 
as far as application developers are concerned. I've been aware of 
this problem for a while and have started breaking it up to allow 
other kinds of use.

Early days, so nothing's close to working yet (there's a lot of 
dependencies to pull apart, new APIs to create, etc.), but here's an 
idea of what I'm doing:

- The Python/AE type converters and AE dispatch code have moved to a 
new package, AEM. I've already started work on this. This should 
provide a basic interface for AE communication without being tied to 
application terminology resources.

- Specifier construction and ApplicationTerminology will also be spun 
off into individual concerns.

- Specifier construction needs to take a two-tier approach: the 
current, terminology-guided, validating, syntactically-sugared 
interface, and a slightly lower-level API for constructing complex 
specifiers using AE codes only which will probably end up in AEM.

- 'appscript' itself will end up as 'just another' client to these 
services; in its case providing a high-level, AppleScript-like 
application scripting interface just as it currently does. (It'll get 
all the terminology-based specifier stuff.) So it should continue to 
work and feel much as it already does, but will no longer be the only 
way to do AEs.

- I've not looked at AE receiving or asynchronous use yet, but should 
get round to it eventually. BTW, one of the reasons for putting lots 
of input-checking into Specifiers is that it'll make a nice system 
for handling incoming Apple events, able to do a lot of user input 
validation and intelligent error reporting (unlike Cocoa Scripting, 
which is atrocious for this sort of thing). The ultimate goal, of 
course, being to create a complete Python Scripting framework (like 
appscript, this is something I'll eventually need myself for another 
project I'm working on), although that is still a looong way off.

I expect this work to take some months; I'll probably release 0.6.0 
in the interim (I've knocked out a few bugs and tidied some code, and 
working with Ryan Wilcox to add remote scripting support).

As always, I'm open to suggestions, requests, assistance, etc.

HTH

has
-- 
http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/