Jerry wrote: > Kind of like AppleScript then? Same fundamental goal, i.e. language-independent application scripting. They seem to have a similar sort of approach to decoupling a scripting language from its host application (Kross::API::ScriptManager vs. the Open Scripting Architecture API) but a very different approach to the intercommunication part.
Kross appears to create native language wrappers for the application's public (C++) classes; nothing fancy, but pretty straightforward. Mac apps use serialised procedure calls containing first-class queries and other arguments to describe the action to perform and the application object(s) to use in that action. A query engine in the application framework (e.g. Cocoa Scripting) locates the actual object(s) and applies the appropriate action to them. Much higher level of abstraction and a lot more sophisticated, though it can be a bit tricky for application developers to implement (for the same reason). Plus I get the impression that Kross doesn't do interprocess yet although it's on the cards, presumably using something like proxy objects and dbus to provide the bridge. With Macs you only need OSA for intraprocess communication; the Apple Event Manager, which handles the messaging part, can pass messages between processes as well. > Sorry, just starting to learn about some of this stuff (CLI, CLR, CIL, > etc...) and am interested in understanding better. As far as how the Mac does it, here's an old but good paper on the basic principles involved if you want to know more: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wcook/papers/AppleScript/AppleScript95.pdf I couldn't find a nice, simple overview of the Kross system. You should be able to form a rough impression from reading through the following links, although some better examples of calling Kexi from scripts would help: http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=kross http://www.kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.php?Scripting http://www.kexi-project.org/docs/cvs-api/html/namespaceKross.html HTH -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
