It defines which syntax to use when presenting the dictionary entries. Change the values and see what happens.
I’m not going to way in much on this topic, for one thing I don’t know much JXA. But here are some quick thoughts:
It is easier for people to ignore a single long topic. If this topic is designed to solicit answers to the question of how to document JXA appropriately, then a single topic makes sense, and one topic for each possible thing to document would be much more noisy.
As @ComplexPoint says, JXA is the same language as JavaScript in the browser or JavaScript in a Custom HTML Prompt. This is true in the same way you can program a Mac or Windows or Linux machine in C++ - it is the same language, but the enclosing environment (platform, libraries, capabilities, etc) is very different.
The results of this topic would presumably best be a wiki page. There is already a wiki page: https://wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/JavaScript_for_Automation and it would be a good host for whatever information, or if necessary the information could be broken into multiple pages. Possibly there should be a https://wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/JavaScript page (not currently) that described information about the language and the various different environments it appears in.
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I moved the above two posts to the “meta” category (which is the Category dealing with this forum), since they are about forum issues, and have nothing to do with this topic, JXA.
(one would hope that MacOS Sierra will be adopting the ES 6 Safari 10 JavaScript interpreter, which brings tail recursion optimisation, simpler lambdas, etc etc).
A footnote from experimenting with Sierra:
It is indeed using Safari 10, so in JavaScript for Automation, we can now (given MacOS Sierra) write things like:
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Awesome!
Is this going to require Sierra, or will an update be made available to El Cap and Yosemite? I don’t know how Apple handles these things.
Good question … not sure …
###To all concerned:
We've had a bit of discussion about the best way to provide JavaScript for Automation (JXA) support, both for ourselves and those new to JXA.
I sense a consensus that having one long topic is probably not the best approach. If anyone disagrees that this is the concensus, please feel free to object and state your opinion.
Having thought about it for a while, IMO we should avoid reinventing the wheel, and try to make use of the existing JXA wiki:
###JavaScript for Automation Cookbook
From its Foreword · dtinth/JXA-Cookbook Wiki
####Contributions Welcome
But still, I don't have everything figured out. I am learning, like you. There is a lot to be discovered in this new JavaScript environment. So, to make it easy to edit and collaborate, I've put the contents on GitHub wiki, which anyone can contribute.
So, if you have anything to add to this cookbook, just hit that edit button. If you found any typo, also hit that edit button. And if you have trouble understanding some part of the cookbook, you can open a GitHub issue on this repository.
So, please enjoy automating your Mac with JavaScript, and hope you have fun!
—Thai Pangsakulyanont 2014-11-01
Here are the advantages I see:
- It already has a solid base of JXA information
- The owner, Thai, seems very open to contributions by others
- It is already fairly well known to the JXA community
- It is more likely to attract JXA users from everywhere, not just those who use KM
- It is part of a GitHub reprosiitory, which has a decent facility for Q&A:
- Issues · dtinth/JXA-Cookbook
- Includes option to subscribe to new questions/posts
- Has a good editor for posts, based on markdown
- Issues can be marked "closed" when resolved/answered.
- It is easy to provide links to anything, like the KM forum, wiki articles, etc
- If we think it would help, we could even propose add a section on KM to the JXA wiki
The only downsides I see are:
- Not as much control as we would have here
- Creates another web site we would need to watch/subscribe to.
Your thoughts?
Apart from the shift to Safari 10’s ES6 JavaScript interpreter, the only other change to JXA that I immediately notice is a couple of new methods in the ObjC component of the Automation object - some help for dealing with ObjC functions which include reference types in their arguments.
If you run the code in the previous post (to inspect the broad contours of the automation object), you now see , in addition to the earlier listing:
ObjC.castObjectToRef
ObjC.castRefToObject
Perhaps useful, for example, with ObjC error reference handling.
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@DanThomas and all:
I just added a new forum tag "learning" that I think will really work well for your objective.
If we start a new topic for each JXA question/issue/learning example, and tag it with "jxa" and "learning", then anyone can quick bring up all JXA learning topics with this search:
tags:jxa tags:learning
Your thoughts?
Probably a good idea, although I never think to use tags. But others will probably appreciate it.
It's just a matter of habit.
Of course, I was already a big tag user from my Evernote usage.
I find them very helpful. Try the search now to see the benefit:
tags:jxa tags:learning