Scripting (Re: GTalK 0.01)

Marcel Weiher marcel at system.de
Thu Jan 7 05:57:24 UTC 1999


[ UNIX Scripting, exporting object interfaces, AppleScript ]

Shell scripts are great for connecting pipes/filters, they suck for  
programming, extensions.  One of my goals has been to bring the power  
of pipes/filters to Squeak in a form that is just as convenient as  
UNIX shells while providing all the power of objects (see my previous  
posts).

As to real scripting, a great reference for this is the work Apple  
is doing integrating AppleScript/Apple Events with Objective-C in  
MacOS-X-Server.  They're really leveraging the extremely dynamic  
Objective-C runtime to provide a scripting interface that is almost  
wholly a by-product of creating a proper model/document object.

Once my Objective-C bridge does call-backs it should be very easy to  
integrate this mechanism into Squeak in a transparent fashion, that  
is as if the native components were actually Squeak objects, because  
of the great similarity between Smalltalk and Objective-C.  Once  
integrated and working, the native components can be incrementally  
replaced by real Squeak objects for those platforms without native  
support.

Marcel





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