Advice requested on tool(s) for my project

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

I’m a new AppleScripter (but I did do some Userland Frontier scripting years ago) and I’ve got a personal project that is perfect for AppleScript, but I’m looking for advice on what toolset to invest my time in. Free tools would be preferred.

The project is a simple GUI admin tool for my new wireless router. I’m actually using a shared dialup line, rather than broadband. The router can be configured to auto-dial, but the phone line is shared for voice use, so I don’t want that. I basically want two buttons for connecting and disconnecting the modem, plus the logged status that appears on the web based admin application of the router (so I can see any error messages that might happen). To complicate matters, I need this to run both on OS 9 and OS X.

I’ve already figured out how to do the HTTP POST communication with the router from curl on the command line or using URL Access Scripting through AppleScript. I’ve begun to play with Smile’s dialog features under OS X. I’m sure I can figure out how to parse the status log messages from the router’s web pages.

Is Smile the right tool? I see that it has an OS 9 version (which I haven’t downloaded yet) but will the dialogs be portable? Is AppleScript Studio portable between 9 and X and if so, is it a better choice?

Thanks for any opinions.

#2

AppleScript Studio is only intended for X. I don’t know about Smile dialog’s portability, but I’d say that the format Smile uses to store dialogs/scripts is “9 compatible with X”, “X not fully compatible with 9”. It may depend on the controls you use in your dialog… ?

Anyway, Smile is a powerful and easy-to-use tool, and I think that create two separate dialog/apps doing the same stuff (if needed) would not be a hard work…

#3

I think that JJ is mostly correct, with the small exception that (as far as I know from the developer of Smile) the dialogs are transferable.

The Satimage OSAX – included in the Smile download, can also be freely distributed with your solutions, whether commercial or not. That means that you can, using Smile, create very sophisticated applications with a friendly UI and they will be generally portable.

Now, keep in mind that JJ is very right about issues related to things that do not even exist in OS9. But, as he said, with good (and proper ?) script writing, using sub-routines for tasks that may be OS-dependent, you can make a second version any time you need.

HTH