When developing my recent utility I have thought it could be useful if other
users could access the output from some of its features, in other words
inter-application communication. Stacks can do this if the utility is running
in the IDE but not when run as a standalone.
Now a Mac fully-featured app is encouraged to implement AppleScript access. It
appears LC has a couple of features for helping to implement AS, (send to
program and reply) but implementing AC in an LC standalone still looks to be
even more complicated than in Xcode, where it so painful than most apps don’t
bother: you have to set up a separate event handler and create the AS
dictionary, and the AS language itself is abstruse to say the least — but how
fantastically useful are those apps like Excel which do the implementation
well! LC appears to have nothing for VB for Windows and I have no idea how to
to do it myself on Windows. And of course there is nothing for Linux (go away
and write your own sockets implementation at both ends!!)
How cool would it be if LC standalones could easily talk to each other, at
least when running on the same platform, which is where AppleScript and VB
live! It certainly is possible, I have done at least one half of it running
scripts in an LC app from a shell interface, connecting via sockets; but the
learning curve for the coding was high.
[Remote IAC raises knotty problems of implementation (secure login or Html
POST?) and heightened security problems - though LC actually already does
Remote Debugging which is related but not quite the same as normal IAC usage;
for example with Remote Debugging you can run any script remotely unless it is
password protected, quite the opposite of what you want IAC access to do. And
it only works from the IDE source]
I don’t know if this idea has been raised before, but I reckon all it should
need for a very LC-style implementation would be:
In the target app, expose a handler by simply marking it as public. And
preferably provide a manifest describing the usage and input/output.That’s it.
No dictionary resource files, no coding.
In the source app I'm guessing one would only have
Open application “foo” for IAC with credentials “its me" -> an access id
and array of handlers and their manifests
Dispatch “myhandler” to application “foo” with <parameters> -> the result
or error if not handled for timed out
Close application pAccessId
The engine would handle finding the LC app, connecting to a socket
automatically opened on launch if the app has a public handler, getting user
authorisation [Allow Always? On Launch? On Request?] and swapping certificates,
and then data transfer. I leave this part as an exercise for the reader
Neville
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