AppleScript with Groovy

Today I was looking into Java and AppleScript to see what is possible. But since Java has this nice little brother called Groovy, I wanted to try to execute AppleScript from within a Groovy script. With Java SE 6 AppleScript has been provided as a ScriptEngine to the javax.script API, which makes using it much easier. My little example script opens an URL in the default browser, takes a screenshot and notifies the user.

import javax.script.*
 
def takeScreenshot = """\
open location \"http://www.bitwalker.nl\"
delay 5
do shell script \"screencapture screenshot.pdf\"
"""
 
ScriptEngineManager mgr = new ScriptEngineManager()
ScriptEngine engine = mgr.getEngineByName("AppleScript")
engine.eval(takeScreenshot)
engine.eval("say \"Your screenshot is ready\"")

You can run this directly in the GroovyConsole or as regular Groovy script. Don’t forget to set JAVA_HOME to 1.6.

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