An Interesting Alternative to AppleScript – JSTalk
I've a big fan of Gus M's work at Flying Meat, and this morning I was reading about his alternative to AppleScript - JSTalk. The idea is simple - when creating a Mac app, adding AppleScript support is something most users expect from a high-quality app. But from what I've heard, and Gus seconds this, doing so is not easy which is why not all things you can do in an app can be done within AppleScript. In many cases, it's a limited subset.
So Gus made JSTalk - built on JSCocoa and WebKit's JavaScriptCore, that allows you to write JavaScript and interact with an application on that level as opposed to using AppleScript. He's got a command-line tool, an editor, and a framework for people to put into their apps to allow it to be 'automated' from JSTalk. The examples are compelling. The ideas are pretty sound.
What remains to be seen is how many will adopt it. It's all open source on the MIT license on GitHub, so it's there for the looking, fixing, using. If I had an app, I'd look at using this because there are a lot more people that know JavaScript than know AppleScript. It's just a language that not a lot of folks spend the time to learn.
So I'm going to keep an eye on this... if I make an app, I'll use it. It looks very nice, and all the hard work is done. Glad to see an alternative to AppleScript.