AppleScript support - 10.3/10.4

[Dragan Milić]

Hello everyone,

Perhaps this should be posted to any of lists dedicated to  
AppleScript, but is' related not to AppleScript specifically, but  
more to support for it in an Cocoa application, so I still hope this  
is the right place. If not, I apologise in advance.

I've developed a UB Cocoa app, which still needs to work on Panther  
10.3+, so even prior 10.3.9. For that reason, I built the executable  
with the following environment variables:

GCC_VERSION_i386:					4.0
GCC_VERSION_ppc:						3.3
MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET_i386:	10.4
MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET_ppc:	10.3
SDKROOT_i386:							/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk
SDKROOT_ppc:							/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.3.9.sdk

The app works fine on both 10.3.x and 10.4.x on PPC and 10.4.x on  
Intel. Now I need to add some basic AppleScript support, and there I  
encounter a problem, probably related to differences in scripting  
definitions in 10.3 and 10.4. Following Apple Developer  
documentation, I've created .def file and run sdp tool to produce  
both .scriptSuite and .scriptTerminology files. All three files are  
then included into app bundle resources.

On 10.3.x and PPC, everything works OK, I can open app's scripting  
definition dictionary from within Script Editor and successfully use  
all definitions from my scripting suite (classes, commands, etc.).  
The same goes for running on 10.4.x and Intel processors. But, I've  
got a problem when running on 10.4.x and PPC. I can still open  
scripting definition dictionary from within Script Editor and read  
all the definitions from my scripting suite, but if I try to use any  
of them in the script, the Script Editor complains about undefined  
variable. For example, there is the command "extract" in the suite, I  
can clearly see it when opening dictionary, but every attempt to use  
it in the script results with the "The variable extract is not  
defined." message in an error sheet of the editor. The same goes for  
classes, type definitions, etc. Building the executable without  
environment variables mentioned above solves the problem, so I can  
successfully script the app on 10.4.x and PPC, but of course, I can't  
run it on system version prior to 10.3.9 (because of gcc 4.0).

Clearly, the collision happens when trying to script executable built  
for 10.3 and running on 10.4. What is not clear to me is how this  
situation can be overcome. Any hint or tip is highly appreciated.

Regards,
Milke