5.8. Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the four key concepts behind application scripting: how applications represent your data as objects, how applications allow you to manipulate these objects using commands, how these objects are organized into an object model, and how application dictionaries document all of this information. This is a lot of material to digest, so let's spend a bit of time reviewing it.

To begin with, you discovered exactly what makes an object an object. First, you learned how objects are categorized by class. Two objects of the same class may contain very different data, but their overall structures are exactly the same. For instance, the Finder contains many thousands of folder objects, all with different names and containing different files and subfolders. Because you know that all of these objects belong to the folder class, you can be certain that they will always have a name property and file and folder elements, and can be manipulated in the same ways.