Reviewer's Guide
Reviewer's GuideThere is a perception in the Macintosh scripting community that Frontier and AppleScript are competitive. Actually, they are totally complementary, since there isn't much feature overlap, and since Frontier is also a great AppleScript development and runtime environment.
And now that Frontier is free, and AppleScript always was free, how could they possibly be competitive?
Regardless, the perception is that they are competitive. So, compete we will! As MacWEEK says, Frontier blows the doors off AppleScript.
Here's how.
Defining the Category
First, let's define the category.
It's called "Macintosh System-Level Scripting Environments." The purpose of system-level scripting software is to offer inventive users a way to customize and automate the use of the Macintosh file system, operating system, networks and application and utility software.
To serve this market a product must offer a complete set of integrated tools that support script editing and debugging, user interface design, persistent storage of information, a comprehensive verb set, and documentation and support tools.
System-level scripting is not a new category. Character-based systems, such as Unix and MS-DOS, offered system-level scripting thru their shell/batch languages. But more powerful operating systems such as the Macintosh OS offer an opportunity to do much more.
Who is the user?
The largest audience for scripting tools are Macintosh network managers; desktop publishing service bureaus; Internet system managers, web content developers and end-users; in-house and consulting/contracting organizations; commercial software developers.
The people are script writers. Their users range widely in levels of experience and committment to using computers. Some of the tools script writers develop are for their own use, and others are deployed to end-users and others run on servers.
Frontier is designed first to serve the needs of script writers, and in doing so, supporting their users.
Basic Feature Set
The scripting system should define a full-featured language with logic and looping. sub-procedures, error recovery, compilation and coercion. It should have a persistent storage system.
The language should include built-in verbs to control the Macintosh operating system, file system, network and scriptable applications. Full access to the resource forks of files should be provided.
It should excel at text and numeric operations and have an open architecture to support new data types and allow compiled machine code to be executed.
Scripts should be able to call other scripts. Script writers should be able to add verbs to the language.
A full-featured script editor should be included, with an integrated script debugger. Full documentation should be included, both in print and in on-line form. It should come with a wide variety of sample scripts in source code. It should be easy to put a standard user interface on scripts and sets of scripts. A runtime interpreter should be available.
A native PowerPC version should be available.
About the Feature List
In the following sections, we break out each of the categories and detail the specific features that we believe should be part of the standard feature set for Mac system scripting. The list is brief, and many of the items are just examples of features, backed up by entire sub-systems in the Frontier software.
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This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Sun, May 26, 1996 at 11:35:56 AM. Thanks for checking it out! Dave |