Everyone...

I appreciate all of the responses to my query regarding making an
application scriptable. The information referenced in your responses said
basically the same things...

Responding to the core Apple Events is straightforward; the example in the
FB manual is easily installed and works well.

Developing a suite of custom events is daunting. Even ResEdit doesn't have
a template for aete or aeut resources. This would seem to be a major
obstacle to overcome. The Scriptability article at
http://pascal-central.com/scripting.html suggests pirateing the aete
resource from the Scriptable Text Editor as a starting point. Since I'm in
the FBII environment a standalone resource editor like Resourcerer rather
than Rez, which is embedded in MPW, might make the situation better but,
while $256 may be a perfectly reasonable price for Resourcerer, I'm not
real keen on spending the money for it when the rest of what it takes to
implement scriptability is such an awesome undertaking.

FBII is a great development environment for me and I'll not abandon it
while there is any possibility (which I still believe there is) that FB^3
will be along "soon". As soon as it's available my order for FB^3 is on its
way faster than you can say "Charge It".

I have never regretted choosing FB as my development environment and I in
no way mean what follows as critical of Andy or Staz or anyone else
connected with FB or with FB itself but the lack of tools necessary to do
scripting is disappointing. The primary reason I chose FB was because I
didn't have to spend too much time on the fundamentals of interfacing with
the Mac OS as FB did the vast majority of it for me. Instead, I could spend
my time developing my application and that, after all, is my primary goal.
And FB is not alone in its shortfall relative to scripting. In my opinion
Apple is primarily responsible for the lack of Apple Event/Applescript
development in the Mac community because they designed and built Apple
Events and it is clearly more complicated than it needs to be.

At any rate, I would like to thank everyone who responded to my query about
scripting. I now know what I'm up against if I want to pursue scripting my
application and that's further along than I was before.

I'd like to appeal to Staz Software to build a Scriptability adjunct to
FB^3 after FB^3 is not the primary thing on their collective minds and it
is well on its way to being the commercial success that we all know it will
be.

If I can make any progress that is worth sharing this list will be the
first to know.


Charlie Dickman
charlied@...