Can anyone give an educated answer where ASOC is headed? Will this end up being another ASS development environment where Apple wont support it and eventually give it up? I’m using Xcode 3.2.6 and heard 4 has no improvements??? I also ask this question because I see Shane churning out ASOC related developments. (AppleScriptObjC Explorer, ASObjC Runner…) Does anyone know something I don’t? I still have some ASS projects I’m converting to ASOC and would like to know if there is a future for ASOC in Xcode.
We can’t look into the future, neither does Apple itself. However that ASOC is poorly documented is normal. The AppleScriptObjC framework lets you write AppleScript plugins for you application, that’s all. Because it’s a lightweight and simple bridge I don’t seem why Apple should deprecate it, it was understandable why Studio has been deprecated but I won’t understand why AppleScriptObjC would be deprecated.
I think DJ has summed it up nicely. I’d add one other point for the pessimistic: if it did go away, the job of porting to Objective-C, assuming one decided to learn it, would be reasonably straight forward, at least in terms of application structure.
The fact that improvements were made to ASObjC in 10.7 is also a good sign, I think. (And AppleScript Editor in 10.7.2 now works properly as an external editor to Xcode 4.)
Until such time as Apple is willing to abandon scriptable Apps entirely, they have to provide some technology that keeps Applescript projects from looking like something out of 1994. Seems to me that ASOC provides Apple with a way to do that with minimal additional software-development effort on their part.
Of course, the iPad isn’t scriptable, so maybe ‘iOS XI’ will dump scriptable Apps too. That depends on whether Apple wants to sell mass-market toasters, or computers; and Lion moved us a little bit in the direction of toasters.
I’m just as worried as anybody about ASOC leaving. Well more to the point, I am worried about not being able to script 3rd party apps. Heck if I have to write complete ObjC apps to do that, I’m OK with that (been learning Cocoa for 2 years now). But my company, as well as countless others, will be up the brown creek if I can’t make some app that can control InDesign, Filemaker Pro, Photoshop, etc etc.
Well superMacGuy that’s another question. When 3rd party apps aren’t scriptable in the future anymore that means apple events will be removed from the system as well. Also, patron, the idea comes from 1994 but the technique has changed dramatically, especially from Mac OS to OS X.
The question was ASOC’s future, so i will stick there. ASOC is a framework that, when used in an application, allows developers to create plugins written in AppleScript. Because it’s only a framework we should take a look how well supported and the lifetime of other frameworks have been in the past too. For as far as I know, frameworks has never been entirely removed, it’s functionality is sometimes moved into another framework. Also when methods (not much of a concern in ASOC) are removed/deprecated there is in most cases an alternative or new method created.
So looking at ASOC’s future from a framework side of view we could say it will be stable and stay there for a while.