On Jan 24, 2005, at 0:10, Paul Berkowitz wrote:
On 1/23/05 7:53 PM, "Bob Ippolito" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Given the description, it would be trivial to write an Automator Action in PyObjC 1.2+ using the py2app plug-in bundle support. I doubt I'll be using Automator often enough to become a PyObjC Automator evangelist though.
What's the advantage of PyObjC here? Just because it makes it easier
to write the plugin, or does it help with writing the Python code too?
Because I wouldn't mind having automator support in a future "MacPython for Tiger additions"...
The advantage of PyObjC here is that there are two interfaces for
creating plugins: Objective-C plugins that implement a certain method,
and applescripts that implement a certain handler. Since the latter
isn't really possible to do with Python, that leaves PyObjC as the ONLY
option, and it happens to be trivial to do.
Except that you can only write Objective-C Automator actions for Cocoa apps
which expose their entire APIs publicly. Only a few Apple apps do that.
Nobody else will do it - their developers might write their own Obj-C
actions but they won't open source their apps for others to do it. On the
other hand, all applescriptable apps are immediately accessible to
AppleScript Automator actions. You can cut out a lot of the "internal"
scripting by using Cocoa Bindings (as for Obj-C actions) but need
AppleScript to talk to the apps. Probably has's appscript will be able to do
the same in Python. I can't see how far anyone is going to get with PyObjC
except for their own apps, and Apple's Address Book, which Apple is already
providing many actions for.
You're totally wrong here. Automator actions *entirely separate* from applications! Apple applications will not and can not support Automator actions directly, but they may ship with Automator actions. Whether these actions communicate with their application via Apple Events, Distributed Objects, or simply link with the same code and do things directly is beside the point entirely.
Objective-C actions can perform a superset of what AppleScript actions can do, including sending apple events to other applications, so your rant makes no sense. Yes, you could use appscript from a PyObjC plugin. I would expect that the majority of actions that people will write in Python will do very little inter-application communication anyway and instead will do things that Python is significantly better than AppleScript at (doing stuff on a network, mangling files, calling into Objective-C frameworks, etc.).
-bob
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