“AppleScript”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

AppleScript is primarily a scripting language developed by Apple to do inter-application communication (IAC) using Apple events.^[2]^[3] AppleScript is related to, but different from, Apple events. Apple events are designed to exchange data between and control other applications in order to automate repetitive tasks.

AppleScript has some processing abilities of its own, in addition to sending and receiving Apple events to applications. AppleScript can do basic calculations and text processing, and is extensible, allowing the use of scripting additions that add new functions to the language. Mainly, however, AppleScript relies on the functionality of applications and processes to handle complex tasks. As a structured command language, AppleScript can be compared to Unix shells, the Microsoft Windows Script Host, or IBM REXX in its purpose,^[4] but it is unique from all three. Essential to its functionality is the fact that Macintosh applications publish "dictionaries" of addressable objects and operations.

AppleScript has some elements of procedural programming, object-oriented programming (particularly in the construction of script objects), and natural language programming tendencies in its syntax, but does not strictly conform to any of these programming paradigms.^[3]{{rp|xxvi}}

History

In the late 1980s Apple considered using HyperCard's HyperTalk scripting language as the standard language for end-user development across the company and within its classic Mac OS operating system, and for interprocess communication between Apple and non-Apple products.^[5] HyperTalk could be used by novices to program a HyperCard stack. Apple engineers recognized that a similar, but more object-oriented scripting language could be designed to be used with any application, and the AppleScript project was born as a spin-off of a research effort to modernize the Macintosh as a whole and finally became part of System 7.^[6]

AppleScript was released in October 1993 as part of System 7.1.1 (System 7 Pro, the first major upgrade to System 7).^[6] QuarkXPress (ver. 3.2) was one of the first major software applications that supported AppleScript. This in turn led to AppleScript being widely adopted within the publishing and prepress world, often tying together complex workflows. This was a key factor in retaining the Macintosh's dominant position in publishing and prepress, even after QuarkXpress and other publishing applications were ported to Microsoft Windows.

After some uncertainty about the future of AppleScript on Apple's next generation OS, the move to Mac OS X (around 2002) and its Cocoa frameworks greatly increased the usefulness and flexibility of AppleScript. Cocoa applications allow application developers to implement basic scriptability for their apps with minimal effort, broadening the number of applications that are directly scriptable. At the same time, the shift to the Unix underpinnings and AppleScript's ability to run Unix commands directly (with the do shell script command) allowed AppleScripts much greater control over the operating system itself.^[3]{{rp|863}} AppleScript Studio, released with Mac OS X 10.2 as part of Xcode, and later AppleScriptObjC framework, released in Mac OS X 10.6, allowed users to build Cocoa applications using AppleScript.^[3]{{rp|969}}

In a 2013 article for Macworld, veteran Mac software developer and commentator John Gruber concluded his reflection on "the unlikely persistence of AppleScript" by noting: "In theory, AppleScript could be much better; in practice, though, it's the best thing we have that works. It exemplifies the Mac's advantages over iOS for tinkerers and advanced users."^[7]

In October 2016, longtime AppleScript product manager and automation evangelist Sal Soghoian left Apple when his position was eliminated "for business reasons".^[8] Veterans in the Mac community such as John Gruber and Andy Ihnatko generally responded with concern, questioning Apple's commitment to the developer community and pro users.^[9] Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi responded in an email saying that "We have every intent to continue our support for the great automation technologies in macOS!", though Jeff Gamet at The Mac Observer opined that it did little to assuage his doubt about the future of Apple automation in general and AppleScript in particular.^[10] For the time being, AppleScript remains one component of macOS automation technologies, along with Services, Automator, and shell scripting.

Basic concepts

AppleScript was designed to be used as an accessible end-user scripting language, offering users an intelligent mechanism to control applications, and to access and modify data and documents. AppleScript uses Apple events, a set of standardized data formats that the Macintosh operating system uses to send information to applications, roughly analogous to sending XPath queries over XML-RPC in the world of web services.^[3]{{rp|xxvi}} Apple events allow a script to work with multiple applications simultaneously, passing data between them so that complex tasks can be accomplished without human interaction.^[2] For example, an AppleScript to create a simple web gallery might do the following:

For the user, hundreds or thousands of steps in multiple applications have been reduced to the single act of running the script, and the task is accomplished in much less time and with no possibility of random human error. A large complex script could be developed to run only once, while other scripts are used again and again.

An application's scriptable elements are visible in the application's Scripting Dictionary (distributed as part of the application), which can be viewed in any script editor. Elements are generally grouped into suites, according to loose functional relationships between them. There are two basic kinds of elements present in any suite: classes and commands.

All scriptable applications share a few basic commands and objects, usually called the Standard Suite—commands to open, close or save a file, to print something, to quit, to set data to variables—as well as a basic application object that gives the scriptable properties of the application itself. Many applications have numerous suites capable of performing any task the application itself can perform. In exceptional cases, applications may support plugins which include their own scripting dictionaries.

AppleScript was designed with the ability to build scripts intuitively by recording user actions. Such AppleScript recordability has to be engineered into the app—the app must support Apple events and AppleScript recording;^[11] as Finder supports AppleScript recording, it can be useful for reference. When AppleScript Editor (Script Editor) is open and the Record button clicked, user actions for recordable apps are converted to their equivalent AppleScript commands and output to the Script Editor window. The resulting script can be saved and re-run to duplicate the original actions, or modified to be more generally useful.

Comments

Comments can be made multiple ways. A one-line comment can begin with 2 hyphens ({{mono|--}}). In AppleScript 2.0, first released in Mac OS X Leopard, it may also begin with a number sign (#). This permits a self-contained AppleScript script to be stored as an executable text file beginning with the shebang line #!/usr/bin/osascript

For comments that take up multiple lines, AppleScript uses parentheses with asterisks inside.

Hello, world!

In AppleScript, the traditional "Hello, World!" program could be written in many different forms:

display alert "Hello, world!" -- a modal window with a single "OK" button and an icon representing the app displaying the alert

AppleScript has several user interface options, including dialogs, alerts, and list of choices. (The character ¬, produced by typing {{keypress|option|return}} in the Script Editor, denotes continuation of a single statement across multiple lines.)

Each user interaction method can return the values of buttons clicked, items chosen or text entered for further processing. For example:

Natural language metaphor

Whereas Apple events are a way to send messages into applications, AppleScript is a particular language designed to send Apple events. In keeping with the objective of ease-of-use for beginners, the AppleScript language is designed on the natural language metaphor, just as the graphical user interface is designed on the desktop metaphor. A well-written AppleScript should be clear enough to be read and understood by anyone, and easily edited. The language is based largely on HyperCard's HyperTalk language, extended to refer not only to the HyperCard world of cards and stacks, but also theoretically to any document. To this end, the AppleScript team introduced the AppleEvent Object Model (AEOM), which specifies the objects any particular application "knows".

The heart of the AppleScript language is the use of terms that act as nouns and verbs that can be combined. For example, rather than a different verb to print a page, document or range of pages (such as printPage, printDocument, printRange), AppleScript uses a single "print" verb which can be combined with an object, such as a page, a document or a range of pages.

Generally, AEOM defines a number of objects—like "document" or "paragraph"—and corresponding actions—like "cut" and "close". The system also defines ways to refer to properties of objects, so one can refer to the "third paragraph of the document 'Good Day'", or the "color of the last word of the front window". AEOM uses an application dictionary to associate the Apple events with human-readable terms, allowing the translation back and forth between human-readable AppleScript and bytecode Apple events. To discover what elements of a program are scriptable, dictionaries for supported applications may be viewed. (In the Xcode and Script Editor applications, this is under File → Open Dictionary.)

To designate which application is meant to be the target of such a message, AppleScript uses a "tell" construct:

For events in the "Core Suite" (activate, open, reopen, close, print, and quit), the application may be supplied as the direct object to transitive commands:

The concept of an object hierarchy can also be expressed using nested prepositional phrases:

which in another programming language might be expressed as sequential method calls, like in this pseudocode:

AppleScript includes syntax for ordinal counting, "the first paragraph", as well as cardinal, "paragraph one". Likewise, the numbers themselves can be referred to as text or numerically, "five", "fifth" and "5" are all supported; they are synonyms in AppleScript. Also, the word "the" can legally be used anywhere in the script in order to enhance readability: it has no effect on the functionality of the script.

Examples of scripts

set the1 to text returned of (display dialog "1st" default answer "Number here" buttons {"Continue"} default button 1)

set the2 to text returned of (display dialog "2nd" default answer "Number here" buttons {"Continue"} default button 1)

display dialog "You may only input numbers into a calculator." with title "ERROR" buttons {"OK"} default button 1

if the button returned of (display dialog "Add?" buttons {"No", "Yes"} default button 2) is "Yes" then

else if the button returned of (display dialog "Subtract?" buttons {"No", "Yes"} default button 2) is "Yes" then

else if the button returned of (display dialog "Multiply?" buttons {"No", "Yes"} default button 2) is "Yes" then

else if the button returned of (display dialog "Divide?" buttons {"No", "Yes"} default button 2) is "Yes" then

A simple username and password dialog box sequence. Here, the username is John and password is app123:

if the text returned of (display dialog "Username" default answer "") is userAns then

if the text returned of (display dialog "Username : John" & return & "Password" default answer "" buttons {"Continue"} default button 1 with hidden answer) is passAns then

Development tools

Script editors

Script editors provide a unified programing environment for AppleScripts, including tools for composing, validating, compiling, running, and debugging scripts. They also provide mechanisms for opening and viewing AppleScript dictionaries from scriptable applications, saving scripts in a number of formats (compiled script files, application packages, script bundles, and plain text files), and usually provide features such as syntax highlighting and prewritten code snippets.

From Apple

From third parties

Script launchers

AppleScripts can be run from a script editor, but it is usually more convenient to run scripts directly, without opening a script editor application. There are a number of options for doing so:

Related scripting issues

Language essentials

Classes (data types)

While applications can define specialized classes (or data types), AppleScript also has a number of built-in classes. These basic data classes are directly supported by the language and tend to be universally recognized by scriptable applications. The most common ones are as follows:

Language structures

Many AppleScript processes are managed by blocks of code, where a block begins with a command command and ends with an end command statement. The most important structures are described below.

Conditionals

Loops

The repeat loop of AppleScript comes in several slightly different flavors. They all execute the block between repeat and end repeat lines a number of times. The looping can be prematurely stopped with command exit repeat.

Conditional loops. The block inside repeat while loop executes as long as the condition evaluates to true. The condition is re-evaluated after each execution of the block. The repeat until loop is otherwise identical, but the block is executed as long as the condition evaluates to false.

Loop with a variable. When starting the loop, the variable is assigned to the start value. After each execution of the block, the optional step value is added to the variable. Step value defaults to 1.

Enumerate a list. On each iteration set the loopVariable to a new item in the given list

One important variation on this block structure is in the form of on —end ... blocks that are used to define handlers (function-like subroutines). Handlers begin with on functionName() and ending with end functionName, and are not executed as part of the normal script flow unless called from somewhere in the script.

Handlers can also be defined using "to" in place of "on" and can be written to accept labeled parameters, not enclosed in parens.

There are four types of predefined handlers in AppleScript—run, open, idle, and quit—each of which is created in the same way as the run handler shown above.

When a script containing an "open handler' is saved as an applet, the applet becomes a droplet. A droplet can be identified in the Finder by its icon, which includes an arrow, indicating items can be dropped onto the icon. The droplet's open handler is executed when files or folders are dropped onto droplet's icon. References to the items dropped on the droplet's icon are passed to the droplet's script as the parameter of the open handler. A droplet can also be launched the same way as an ordinary applet, executing its run handler.

An idle handler can be used in applets or droplets saved as stay-open applets, and is useful for scripts that watch for particular data or events. The length of the idle time is 30 seconds by default,^[36] but can be changed by including a 'return x' statement at the end of the subroutine, where x is the number of seconds the system should wait before running the handler again.

Script objects can use the same 'tell' structures that are used for application objects, and can be loaded from and saved to files. Runtime execution time can be reduced in some cases by using script objects.

Miscellaneous information

set {variable4, variable5} to variable3 -- copy the list items of variable3 into separate variables variable4 and variable5

Using the same technique for scripting addition commands can reduce errors and improve performance.

Open Scripting Architecture

An important aspect of the AppleScript implementation is the Open Scripting Architecture (OSA).^[37] Apple provides OSA for other scripting languages and third-party scripting/automation products such as QuicKeys and UserLand Frontier, to function on an equal status with AppleScript. AppleScript was implemented as a scripting component, and the basic specs for interfacing such components to the OSA were public, allowing other developers to add their own scripting components to the system. Public client APIs for loading, saving and compiling scripts would work the same for all such components, which also meant that applets and droplets could hold scripts in any of those scripting languages.

One feature of the OSA is scripting additions, or OSAX for Open Scripting Architecture eXtension,^[33] which were inspired by HyperCard's External Commands. Scripting additions are libraries that allow programmers to extend the function of AppleScript. Commands included as scripting additions are available system-wide, and are not dependent on an application (see also {{section link||AppleScript Libraries}}).

JavaScript for Automation

Under OS X Yosemite and later versions of macOS, the JavaScript for Automation (JXA) component remains the only serious OSA language alternative to AppleScript,^[38] though the Macintosh versions of Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl all support native means of working with Apple events without being OSA components.^[27]{{rp|516}}

See also

References

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2. ^¹²³{{cite book |last=Goldstein |first=Adam |title=AppleScript: the missing manual |location=Sebastopol, CA |publisher=O'Reilly Media |date=2005 |isbn=0596008503 |oclc=56912218 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-ynfWvkwzpwC}}
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31. ^Table adapted from: {{cite web |last=Naganoya |first=Takaaki |title=ASObjCExtras Scripting Guide |url=http://www.piyocast.com/download_file/ASObjCExtras_scripting_guide.pdf |website=piyocast.com |accessdate=2017-05-09}}
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35. ^{{cite web|title=POSIX file — Class Reference — AppleScript Language Guide|url=https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/AppleScript/Conceptual/AppleScriptLangGuide/reference/ASLR_classes.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40000983-CH1g-SW15|website=developer.apple.com|accessdate=2018-01-08|language=en}}
36. ^{{cite web |url=https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/AppleScript/Conceptual/AppleScriptLangGuide/conceptual/ASLR_about_handlers.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40000983-CH206-SW14 |title=AppleScript Language Guide: Handlers in Script Applications |website=developer.apple.com |accessdate=2013-07-21}}
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38. ^¹{{cite web |last=Siracusa |first=John |date=2014-10-16 |title=OS X 10.10 Yosemite: The Ars Technica Review: JavaScript automation |url=https://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/os-x-10-10/24/#javascript-automation |website=Ars Technica |accessdate=2017-05-08}}

Overview