Is AppleScript done?

Daniel Jalkut sees the advent of SquirrelFish as an opportunity for Apple to dump AppleScript in favor of Javascript . The idea of using Javascript as a replacement for the AppleScript scripting language in OSX is nothing new. Late Night Software's Javascript OSA has offered that ability for many years already. Daniel's point is that Apple could do a better job at integrating Javascript with the Open Scripting Architecture.

I don't really see SquirrelFish as a factor in this, but certainly agree with the general sentiment. Yes, AppleScript may be more approachable for non-programmers, but Apple now has Automator for that purpose and fighting Javascript is a loosing battle anyway: Javascript will be the lingua franca for scripting purposes anywhere.

ES4 Draft 1 and ES3.1 Draft 1

In recent days, new partial drafts for the upcoming ECMAScript specs have become available. Parts of the ECMAScript 4 spec draft were previously spread all over the email archives. Nice to have them compiled in one place. The ECMAScript 3.1 spec draft wasn't available at all before, as far as I'm aware.

Want ES4 in Helma today?

Then take the just released Mascara Javascript 2 to Javascript 1 converter written in Python, run it using Jython on the Java Virtual Machine, and invoke it using Rhino inside of Helma, evaluating the results. Ok, now my head hurts.

SquirrelFish!

SquirrelFish! It's a new bytecode interpreter in Apple's JavaScriptCore inspired by Lua . While the switch to a bytecode interpreter brings Apple's Javascript engine more in line with the engines of Mozilla and Adobe, there are still some different approaches in SquirrelFish compared to the Tamarin based ActionMonkey project (which will replace SpiderMonkey in the future).

ES4 comes to IE via Screaming Monkey

Mark Hammond announced a first binary release of Screaming Monkey - the Tamarin based Active Scripting Engine for IE that will deliver ECMAScript 4 support as a replacement scripting engine for JScript.

One likely scenario is that Adobe will include Screaming Monkey as part of a future Flash version to distribute it to virtually all IE browser users, making Javascript 2.0 a viable target platform for Web Applications in a reasonable amount of time.

Apple's position on ECMAScript 4 proposals

Finally, the Apple folks are getting around to adding their thumbs up or down to the list of ES4 proposals.

They "applied red rather more liberally than the other vendors", as they themselves put it. They made some interesting votes: No "like"?, no "Namespace"?, no Function.bind?, no "let"? Unfortunately, they red inked the proposals related to adding meta object support. On the other hand, they red inked Nullability and Non-nullable classes, which doesn't make me cry.

Forthcoming at the end of this week will be a whitepaper explaining the criteria they applied along with the rational behind the votes on proposals where Apple's position differs from the one of other vendors. Until then, there is only so much that can be read into those red flags.

Helma Meeting Spring 2008

The Helma Meeting Spring 2008 , a real-world gathering of Helma users and developers, will take place on May 6th or 7th at werkzeugH in Vienna, Austria.

Let's get together and talk about upcoming Helma 1.7 features, exchange ideas for the future of the Helma project and discuss anything else that needs to be addressed.

Join us if you can!

Upate: The date is now definitely set to May 6th.

>>> Attila Szegedi about Rhino, Helma and Server-Side Javascript, and scripting on the JVM in general