Scott Nichol, mac:method.com
Track: Sys Admin and Networking
Date: Thursday, October 30
Time: 2:30pm - 3:15pm
Location: Lafayette/San Tomas/Lawrence
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The combination of networked Mac OS X machines and AppleScript technology presents a powerful distributed computing environment. Using Remote Apple Events, developers can divide computationally intensive tasks and distribute them across a network. Harnessing the collective processing power of an entire network's computing resources will significantly reduce the time required to perform large tasks.
Script Daemons
Using either small AppleScript applets or full AppleScript Studio applications, developers can create distributed clients that automatically register themselves with and respond to processing requests from a remotely located control application.
Distributing Tasks for Scriptable Applications
The Mac OS X programming APIs have well documented methods for creating scriptable applications. AppleScript can remotely control any commercial, shareware, or in-house application built with AppleScript support. Using a distributed scripting model, developers can spread computationally intensive tasks to applications on machines across a network and dramatically reduce processing times.
Handling Concurrency Issues
The shared resources and potential conflicts of distributed computing tasks represent significant hurdles for developers. AppleScript provides powerful mechanisms to overcome these hurdles. See how small amounts of AppleScript code can allow developers to set up the data structures required for effective distributed systems.
This session will show developers how to:
set up efficient distributed computing systems using only AppleScript technology
implement the basic mechanisms required to design distributed systems and how to implement them using AppleScript
programmatically communicate with applications across a network
build self-aware distributed computing systems that can cooperate to perform larger tasks
