[MacPerl] Re : MacPerl/Tk, FaceSpan, Send Data and friends

[Georg_Bauer@muensterland.org (Georg Bauer)]

Vincent Nonnenmacher <dpi@pobox.oleane.com> wrote:

> I don't think you get the point here.

I think you don't get it here. I don't want to communicate with an
external application because AppleEvent is slow. And for sure I do not
want to communicate with something built on AppleScript, because
AppleScript gives a whole now definition to the word "slow".

Actually I use MacPerl because it is _fast_. What I definitely need is
something to build GUIs that can be easily ported to other systems - as
soon as my Perl scripts should run on Unixes, I need such a thing. And
the only option there is Perl/TK. And tell you what: I don't give a dime
on how those scripts look. Actually I won't use TK for Mac-only scripts
even with TK 8.0, because TK sucks. But Unix-users are suckers, so give
them what they deserve ;-)

What MacPerl needs though, is a native interface that's easier to use
than direct toolbox calls. Toolbox is much to complicated to just jot
down a simple idea and build a prototype. A MacApp-like structure (a
class framework) would help much - you could use existing Mac
documentation and you could build constructors and such in MacPerl to
make it even more easy to build GUIs. But this should be written in
MacPerl (or in some native extensions to MacPerl), because anything else
is just to slow to be usefull.

I am currently using MacPerl for several tools. One converts message
formats from some proprietary BBS format to the Soup format to be read
by MacSoup. 60% of the runtime is for calling ZipIt using the DoScript
feature of MacPerl. That's no fault of MacPerl - it's a fault of
AppleScript/AppleEvent. Hey, it even isn't that reliable: from time to
time I get timeout's starting ZipIt! And that are local applications!

Sorry to say that, but with AppleEvents, Apple got a great idea and a
nice concept and totally missed the goal with it's implementation.

bye, Georg

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