Re: GNOME 2.8: Scripting

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 09:00, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 15:28 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> > On Llu, 2004-03-29 at 14:31, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > > Well, at-spi will continue to exist, I think it's probably the right
> > > level of interfaces for most scripting. The IPC channel it's going over
> > > isn't exposed directly so you could code to it without wasting time.
> > 
> > Having played with REXX on OS/2 I definitely agree that at-spi is the
> > right layer. It might want some helper library but that helper library
> > if needed would also improve ease of writing accessibility tools.
> > 
> ok, then excuse my ignorance, but how does scripting with at-spi look
> like? I mean, if I'm not wrong, at-spi allows you to access the
> individual widgets on a given application, to set / get their values, or
> simulate actions (key presses, etc). But, I can't see how this could
> help in doing high-level scripting, like the example of Evolution's
> sendMail method I mentioned before.
> 

Well, you probably need both. The UI-based scripting of at-spi lets you
do things really easily sort of "macro-recorder" style. But robust
ABI-guaranteed interfaces can't be done that way.

I guess Office has some elaborate weird hack where you can specify the
office version the script aims at, and it supports invoking the menu
items etc. from that office version. Someone explained this to me once
and it sounded scary.

Havoc