/tags/osa/ Recent content in Osa on galvanist Hugo en Sat, 28 Mar 2020 18:28:48 +0100 /posts/2020-03-28-jxa_notes/ Sat, 28 Mar 2020 18:28:48 +0100 /posts/2020-03-28-jxa_notes/ <h1 id="overview">Overview</h1> <p>There is a macOS feature called the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript#Open_Scripting_Architecture">Open Scripting Architecture</a> (OSA) which provides an infrastructure for intercommunication and automation of macOS software. One of the officially supported OSA languages is JavaScript and its use in this context is called &ldquo;JavaScript for Automation&rdquo; which is often abbreviated to &ldquo;<strong>JXA</strong>&rdquo;.</p> <p>The idea is that instead of using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript">AppleScript</a>, you can program &amp; automate macOS using a more modern language like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript">JavaScript</a>. This gives the programmer access to the enormous ecosystem of javascript libraries and tools in addition to all the modern optimizations and language features of ES6-ish JavaScript. JXA also provides access to a built-in Objective-C bridge that enables access to the file system and the ability to call into the Cocoa frameworks and plain C functions. JXA can basically do anything native code can. It&rsquo;s a bit like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node.js">node</a> without needing to install node.</p>