darwin mc

[Scott Raney]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2002 Richard MacLemale <rmaclemale at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I know that MetaCardCarbon does not honor shell (as in put shell("ls *")
> into field 1)... Am I correct in assuming that the darwin mc engine is also
> unable to do shell commands?  I tried and it didn't work but wanted to
> verify it here.  

Works fine here...

> This is my number one need for MetaCard right now (the ability to run UNIX
> commands.)  Using MetaCard as a bridge between shell commands and the
> average user is a VERY good idea.  There are people using Apple's new
> AppleScript Studio to do this right now, but performance is very, very
> s-l-o-w.  MetaCard could toast AppleScript Studio if it had this ability...
> 
> It would kick serious butt to get this feature in both darwin.mc and
> MetaCardCarbon...

We're currently researching adding this to the Carbon engine, but it's
a pretty hairy problem because none of the APIs we use for this
feature on the UNIX platforms are available in Carbon.  Worse, there's
no good way to integrate events from the GUI with events generated
when the subprocess writes something to the pipe that the engine reads
from (on UNIX systems everything comes in the same place), so at best
it will be much slower than it is on UNIX platforms and at worst you
may lose the ability to do anything at all when a shell() process is
running (i.e., no redraws, no way to abort out, etc.).

As for externals, note that none of the UNIX engines support them
except when running in the graphical mode.  You can do this with
Embedded MetaCard, however.  You can also use sockets in the
non-graphical mode which could be used to access externals running in
a server running in graphical mode someplace.
  Regards,
    Scott

> :)
> Richard MacLemale
> Instructional Technology Specialist
> James W. Mitchell High School
> http://mitchellonline.pasco.k12.fl.us

********************************************************
Scott Raney  raney at metacard.com  http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...