[Pythonmac-SIG] Generate OSA Suite in 10.2.3

[Donovan Preston]

On Sep 25, 2003, at 4:43 PM, Jack Jansen wrote:

>
> On 25-sep-03, at 7:17, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>> This is not something you want to use, the OSA support in the 
>> MacPython standard library is extremely difficult to use, what you 
>> want is my aeve package.
>
> Well, well, well.... I know you're pretty proud of aeve, and it 
> definitely has
> a number of advantages over the old stuff, but calling the old stuff 
> "extremely
> difficult to use" is hyperbole. After you've run gensuitemodule 
> they're 99%
> identical in use. And running gensuitemodule is just the press of a 
> button
> (except for the misbehaving applications for which you also have to do 
> extra
> work with aeve, or have you solved that in the mean time?).

Hmm. I would certainly not say they are 99% identical in use. 
gensuitemodule packages are not very "pythonic" in that you can't 
iterate over things you would like to, can't easily access/change 
properties without using the get and set verbs, and other stuff that 
aeve makes nice that I'm not thinking about right now. Unfortunately I 
quit my job that involved AppleEvents right around the time Bob wrote 
aeve otherwise I probably would have written some documentation about 
it and how it makes things much nicer.

Anyway, all I really care about is that Python's AppleEvent support 
gets better, whether it means fixing bugs in ae* and gensuitemodule, or 
improving aeve and getting it into the stdlib. And the more people that 
understand a lot about it the better. Here are the slides from the talk 
I gave at OSCON which will hopefully help everyone understand the 
underlying issues slightly better:

http://soundfarmer.com/content/slides/PythonAppleEvents.pdf

Note that the "proposed future syntax" slide at the end was written 
while aeve was not yet complete, and Bob has told me that the sample 
code on that slide won't work without some minor changes.

dp