I sent this reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED]; please follow up there if you care to
discuss this, since it is Mac OS X-specific.
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Doug McNutt) wrote:
> I just saw this on the AppleScript mailing list.
> John is probably not a member of this list but I'll bet someone here can help
> off list.
>
> Isn't there a module available?
Yep. A few.
> I've inherited a Perl script with a few routines invoking AS commands which,
> being written a couple of years ago, expects to make the calls through
> MacPerl. Needless to say, it breaks under OS X, but the client still wants
> to use it.
>
> As you'll soon figure out, my Perl is pretty much limited to spelling its
> name correctly, so I may be up against something trivial, but does anyone
> know how I can rewrite the MacPerl calls to run straight through the included
> Perl under OS X? The operative sections all look like this:
>
> {
>
> MacPerl::DoAppleScript(<<END_SCRIPT);
>
> tell application "$myApp"
> [...]
> end tell
>
> END_SCRIPT
> }
>
> Thanks in advance,
> -John DeYoung
The module you want is "MacPerl". Yes, really. :-) It is included as part
of the Mac-Carbon distribution for Mac OS X, which includes the MacPerl.pm
module, and others that were formerly for Mac OS only.
Other options include Mac::AppleScript with its RunAppleScript() function
(that module was written before MacPerl.pm was ported to Mac OS X); and
Mac::OSA::Simple, which is a more generic interface to OSA languages, and
had an applescript() function. It also provides a way to compile an
AppleScript for executing multiple times, or saving to disk, and can load
compiled scripts from disk to execute.
All three functions -- DoAppleScript(), RunAppleScript(), and applescript()
-- function in essentially the same way. DoAppleScript() allows the most
compatibility with MacPerl scripts. applescript() doesn't have significant
advantages in its basic form, as it requires Mac-Carbon anyway, but offers
some extra control.
RunAppleScript()'s only real advantage, that I know of, is that it takes
less to install, as Mac-Carbon is a fairly large and powerful distribution,
and Mac-AppleScript just does this one thing.
There is also calling osascript directly using ``, but that is more error
prone and has no benefits of its own, apart from not needing to install
additional modules. I personally don't consider that a significant benefit.
If you are concerned about performance, all are suitable for most tasks,
except for `osascript`. I ran some Jaguar benchmarks once
(http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.macperl/2748), and here's the result
under Panther:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw(timethese cmpthese);
use Mac::AppleScript 'RunAppleScript';
use MacPerl 'DoAppleScript';
use Mac::OSA::Simple 'applescript';
my $script = 'tell application "Finder" to get name of startup disk';
my %tests = (
applescpt => sub { applescript($script) },
doscript => sub { DoAppleScript($script) },
runscript => sub { RunAppleScript($script) },
osascript => sub { `osascript -ss -e '$script'` }
);
my $results = timethese(500, \%tests);
cmpthese($results);
=====
Benchmark: timing 500 iterations of applescpt, doscript, osascript,
runscript...
applescpt: 4 wallclock secs ( 1.70 usr + 0.29 sys = 1.99 CPU) @
251.26/s (n=500)
doscript: 2 wallclock secs ( 1.11 usr + 0.18 sys = 1.29 CPU) @
387.60/s (n=500)
osascript: 240 wallclock secs ( 0.17 usr 2.34 sys + 108.88 cusr 48.57
csys = 159.96 CPU) @ 199.20/s (n=500)
runscript: 21 wallclock secs ( 6.22 usr + 6.91 sys = 13.13 CPU) @
38.08/s (n=500)
Rate runscript osascript applescpt doscript
runscript 38.1/s -- -81% -85% -90%
osascript 199/s 423% -- -21% -49%
applescpt 251/s 560% 26% -- -35%
doscript 388/s 918% 95% 54% --
=====
As noted previously: I don't know why RunAppleScript is a bit slower, and
osascript is slower because it needs to call out to the shell. The
comparison table is deceptive for osascript because it only shows usr+sys,
not the rest.
Summary: I recommend installing Mac-Carbon, adding "use MacPerl;" to the
script, and using it as-is. If you don't want to install all of Mac-Carbon,
Mac-AppleScript is your best bet. Stay away from osascript.
Cheers,
--
Chris Nandor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pudge.net/
Open Source Development Network [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://osdn.com/
