Inside Macintosh: Interapplication Communication /

Preface - About This Book

This book, Inside Macintosh: Interapplication Communication, describes the interapplication communication architecture, which provides a standard and extensible mechanism for communication among Macintosh applications. This book also describes the system software routines that you can use to implement various forms of interapplication communication in your application.

If you are new to programming on the Macintosh computer, you should read Inside Macintosh: Macintosh Toolbox Essentials for information on how to use menus, windows, and controls in your application; and Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines for a complete discussion of user interface guidelines and principles that every Macintosh application should follow.

This book describes how to implement publish and subscribe features in your application, how to communicate with other applications using Apple events, how to respond to scripts, and how to exchange information with other applications using the PPC Toolbox. It also discusses how your application can use the Data Access Manager to access information from a database application or other data source.

For an overview of all the features provided by the interapplication communication architecture, see the chapter "Introduction to Interapplication Communication" in this book.

To provide support for publish and subscribe features in your application, see the chapter "Edition Manager" in this book. This chapter describes how your application can allow users to share dynamic data among many documents.

To communicate with other applications by using Apple events, first see the chapter "Introduction to Apple Events" for a general introduction to Apple events. For information on how to respond to the required Apple events, see the chapter "Responding to Apple Events." To create and send Apple events, see the chapter "Creating and Sending Apple Events."

You can choose to write your application so that it can recognize descriptions, in Apple events, of objects in the application such as words, paragraphs, shapes, or documents. To do so, see the chapter "Resolving and Creating Object Specifier Records."

In addition to supporting Apple events, you can make your application scriptable--that is, capable of responding to Apple events sent to it by a scripting component. By executing scripts, users of scriptable applications can automate repetitive tasks or conditional tasks that involve multiple applications. For more general information about scripting, see the chapter "Introduction to Scripting." See the chapter "Apple Event Terminology Resources" for information on the resources your application needs to provide in order to be scriptable.

You can also make your application recordable, that is, capable of recording a user's actions for later playback. For more information, see the chapter "Recording Apple Events."

For information on how your application can execute a script with the aid of a scripting component, see the chapter "Scripting Components."

Although you'll usually want to use Apple events to communicate with other applications, if you need low-level control of communication between applications you can use the Program-to-Program Communications (PPC) Toolbox. For more information, see the chapter "Program-to-Program Communications Toolbox."

Applications can use the Data Access Manager to access information from a database application or other data source. For example, a user in San Francisco might use a spreadsheet application to request data from a company database in New York. The spreadsheet application can use the Data Access Manager to request the data from the database. The database application in New York sends back the requested data, and the spreadsheet application can then use this data to generate a graph of the information. For information on sending and retrieving information from a data source, see the chapter "Data Access Manager."

For definitions of specific Apple events and Apple event objects, see the Apple Event Registry: Standard Suites, available from APDA.

For information on handling files in your application and a description of aliases and alias records, see Inside Macintosh: Files.

For information on processes and process serial numbers, see Inside Macintosh: Processes.

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Preface Contents

Format of a Typical Chapter

Conventions Used in This Book

Special Fonts

Types of Notes

Assembly-Language Information

The Development Environment