AppleScript Studio OSA Compatibility

Hi there,

By way of introduction, I'm a young programmer who spends a lot of time in
the world of emergent networks, web services, and the Semantic Web. I'm on
the W3C's RDF Core Working Group. I attended the last WWDC as part of the
student developers program and had a great time.

I've long been a fan of Apple's impressive AppleScript support. Being able
to script the OS is a really compelling feature, and I've used AppleScripts
to help me out many times. I was thrilled to see the addition of Web
services to AppleScript, and your demo with the temperature by zip code is
the finest use of Web services I've ever seen.

While the power in AppleScript is great, its syntax is not the best for long
projects -- at least for programmers like me who are used to
less-English-like scripting languages like Python or Perl. When I saw the
new tools for Cocoa development in Mac OS X, I couldn't help but imagine
programming apps with a backend in my favorite scripting language (Python,
right now). So you can imagine my excitement when seeing AppleScript studio.
I'd just be able to drop in the Python OSA, and my dreams would come true.

Unfortunately, I've heard that supporting OSA languages in AppleScript
Studio is unlikely. I find this disappointing, since it won't open the power
of making exciting Cocoa apps to the large number of scripting language
programmers out there. I, for one, can imagine many interesting apps I would
like to develop, and I know many others who would to.

So I'd like to pledge my support to making AppleScript Studio's power
available to all OSA langauges. Let me know if there's anything I can do to
make this dream a reality.

Many thanks,
Aaron

P.S. Feel free to pass on and quote this letter as you wish.

-- 
[ "Aaron Swartz" ; <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> ; <http://www.aaronsw.com/> ]

Received on Sunday, 2 December 2001 13:34:44 UTC