Overview of Scripting in Mac OS X

Mac OS X supports scripting using an architecture whose primary goal is ease of scriptability. It relies on a few key concepts, such as metadata registry, key-value coding, and the Model-View-Controller paradigm. As long as you adhere to a few design principles (which are based on these concepts), you can make you applications scriptable with little effort.

This section is an overview and does not attempt to provide a comprehensive discussion of scripting concepts. Its aim is to present enough conceptual background to give you a sense of how scripting works in Mac OS X and thus to prepare you for making your applications scriptable.

Overview of Scripting in Mac OS X

Architectural Overview

Scripting Metadata

How a Command Is Composed and Executed

How an Object Specifier Is Evaluated

The Scripting Classes