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In short, an applet behaves like a script object, whose top-level entities you can access in the normal way (see "Top-Level Entities" in Chapter 8). You might think of it as a stored script object that you can target without loading it, and that is automatically persistent without your storing it.

Of course, this means that when you're scripting an applet, no special dictionary is involved. An applet doesn't have a dictionary, and it doesn't need one, any more than a script object needs a dictionary. Therefore an applet has no way to publish information about what top-level entities it contains. The user who wishes to script the applet must know in some other way how to do so (by reading the applet's script, or through some other documentation).

AppleScript Studio

AppleScript Studio is a free development environment from Apple allowing you to write Cocoa applications using the AppleScript language. It would require an entire book to discuss AppleScript Studio adequately, so in this section I'll just explain what AppleScript Studio is and how it works, and talk about how you might go about learning it more fully; I'll also provide a simple hands-on example of AppleScript Studio in action.

Cocoa and AppleScript Studio

AppleScript Studio is Cocoa . The precise sense in which I mean this will be clearer in a moment, but it's a simple truth on the face of it, and it means that to understand what AppleScript Studio is, you need to know what Cocoa is.

Cocoa is a massive application framework included as part of Mac OS X. This framework knows how to do all the things that an application might typically wish to do. For example, it can put up windows, in which it can display many different kinds of interface elements for interacting with the user, such as buttons and text fields and sliders and tables and so forth. It also provides very strong text and graphics capabilities. Cocoa is a remarkably well-constructed application framework, striking an excellent balance between power and flexibility; with Cocoa, it's easy to write a simple standard application quite quickly, while at the same time the framework usually provides enough leeway so that the programmer can fully customize the application's behavior if desired. The presence of Cocoa as part of Mac OS X makes it much easier for programmers to write sophisticated, powerful, Mac OS X-native applications, while at the same time such applications often require relatively little code, because so much of the code that does the work resides in the framework.

AppleScript Studio is Apple's way of letting you, the AppleScript programmer, take advantage of the Cocoa application framework without having to learn a different programming language. The "native" Cocoa programming language is Objective-C , and to use Cocoa fully, you would want to learn that language. But as an AppleScript programmer, you might already have written a working script. You don't want to rewrite its functionality in some other language; you want to enhance your script with a more sophisticated user interface than AppleScript alone can provide. AppleScript Studio can let you do this. Think of it as a way to leverage an existing script into a Cocoa application, a way to wrap a Cocoa interface around AppleScript functionality with relative ease.

AppleScript Studio is not, however, a way to take full advantage of the power of Cocoa. By this I mean that you should not expect AppleScript Studio to let you do everything that Objective-C/Cocoa would let you do. If that's what you want, learn Objective-C! AppleScript Studio gives you access to a limited portion of Cocoa's power; that portion is usually enough to let you write a satisfactory application pretty quickly and easily, provided that your needs are fairly simple and your ambitions don't get out of hand. You should not feel disappointed about the fact that AppleScript Studio exposes to the AppleScript programmer only a simplified fraction of Cocoa's abilities.