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Scriptability Terms

AppleScript is a mature technology that was first introduced in the early 1990’s. When scripting support was added to the Cocoa application framework, a significant part of its ease of use depended on its adoption of key-value coding (KVC), a mechanism for accessing an object’s properties indirectly.

When terms from KVC (some of which come from entity-relationship modeling) were used with Cocoa scripting, some terms overlapped or conflicted with terms already in use by AppleScript. For example, the term property has more than one distinct meaning. For definitions of these terms, see the “Glossary.”

Additionally, there are some differences in how you use the original format for Cocoa scriptability information (provided in script suite and script terminology files) and the current format (based on the sdef file format). These differences are described throughout this chapter.

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