Introduction

Scriptom is an optional Groovy module developed by Guillaume Laforge leveraging the Jacob library (JAva COm Bridge). Once installed in your Groovy installation, you can use a wrapper to script any ActiveX or COM component from within your Groovy scripts. Of course, this module can be used on Windows only.

Scriptom is especially interesting if you are developing Groovy shell scripts under Windows. You can combine both Groovy code and any Java library with the platform-specific features available to Windows Scripting Host or OLE COM automation from Office.

Installation

Zip bundle

The easiest way for installing Scriptom is to unzip the Zip bundle in your %GROOVY_HOME% directory.
The distribution contains the jacob.jar and jacob.dll, and the scriptom.jar. The DLL needs to be in the bin directory, or in your java.library.path to be loaded by jacob.jar.

Building from sources

If you are brave enough and prefer using the very latest fresh version from CVS Head, you can build Scriptom from sources. Checkout modules/scriptom, and use Maven to do the installation automatically. If your %GROOVY_HOME% points at the target/install directory of your groovy-core source tree, just type:

Otherwise, if you have installed Groovy in a different directory, you have two possibilities, either you change the property groovy.install.staging.dest to your %GROOVY_HOME% directory in the project.properties file, and run maven, or you can type:

Usage

Let's say we want to script Internet Explorer. First, we're going to import the ActiveX proxy class.
Then, we're going to create a GroovyObjectSupport wrapper around the ActiveXComponent class of Jacob. And now, we're ready to use properties or methods from the component:

Note however that explorer.Visible returns a proxy, if you want to get the real value of that property, you will have to use the expression explorer.Visible.value or explorer.Visible.getValue().

Limitations

For the moment, Scriptom is in a beta stage, so you may encounter some bugs or limitations with certain ActiveX or COM component, so don't hesitate to post bugs either in JIRA or on the mailing lists. There may be some issues with the mappings of certain objects returned by the component and the Java/Groovy counterpart.

An important limitation for the first release is that it is not yet possible to subscribe to events generated by the components you are scripting. In the next releases, I hope I will be able to let you define your own event handlers with closures, with something like:

But for the moment, event callbacks are not supported.

Samples

If you checkout the scriptom sources, you will find a few samples in the src/script directory.
I will show you some samples in the following sub-sections.

Scripting Internet Explorer

Scripting Excel

Warning: on my machine (WinXP Home), there is still an Excel.exe process running. I have no clue why Excel is still running.

Mixing VBScript or JScript with Groovy

Scripting the Windows Shell object

Scripting Windows Media Player

When event callbacks are supported, you will be able to subscribe to the player.statusChange event, so that you can play the wav entirely, before loading a new sample (instead of listening only to the first second of each sample).