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Test-Driven Development Using AppleScript

by Andy Sylvester
Apr, 2008 Issue

Article Synopsis

AppleScript can be used to automate many tasks on the Mac. However, compared to other scripting languages such as Perl, Python, and Ruby, it can seem somewhat simple and not as applicable for writing larger applications. These other languages also have testing frameworks that can be used for building and testing applications, and have good support for object-oriented programming. A testing framework for AppleScript called ASUnit has been developed, which provides a way to test AppleScript functions. Although AppleScript does not natively support OOP in the common way of Perl, Python, and Ruby, you can structure scripts to provide much of the same functionality. This article will introduce the concepts of test-driven development and demonstrate the use of the ASUnit testing framework.

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