Tim Bumgarner: New Cocoa methods for loading data into a table view in AppleScript Studio. I was just starting to work on a new feature in Manila Envelope that required a table view and I was shuddering at the prospect of having to load it in a repeat loop in AppleScript (in my experience, loops in interpreted languages lead to severe performance problems). Tim’s method allows you to pass a list directly into the method, avoiding looping and making your code much cleaner and faster.
In my experience, further movements in this direction would be wise. Let us programmatically specify a relationship between a data source and a flat file. Or a data source and a relational database. Or a data source and a SOAP call. Features like this were what made programming PowerBuilder such a joy—you could specify the relationship between an arbitrary data source and a class to manipulate that data source easily, and the commands to manipulate the data through the class were consistent no matter what the original data source was.
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