Bellhop Help

Bellhop Language Plug-ins (Contexts)

When creating a new Bellhop service, you can choose from a number of languages in which to implement your service. These languages are implemented by dynamically loaded plug-ins or contexts. Extending Bellhop to support additional languages is simply a matter of writing a new plug-in for the language and instructing Bellhop to load it.

Bellhop ships with plug-ins for a number of languages or contexts: AppleScript, F-Script, Perl, Python and Ruby. These plug-ins are included in the application bundle, and do not require any special installation. If you have additional plug-ins, however, you must install them inside of Bellhop's support folder: $HOME/Library/Application Support/Bellhop/PlugIns Where $HOME represents your home folder.

Plug-ins in your home folder take precedence over the application's bundled plug-ins, so you could, in theory, override a bundled plug-in with your own customized plug-in, although this is discouraged.

 

Context Help

Help is available for each context under the Help menu. Each context displays its help in a separate window and documents the syntax and requirements that are specific to that language. Additionally, each context's help file may contain additional information about custom settings. For example, for each of the scripting languages, you can instruct the plug-in to use a custom interpreter rather than the default interpreter. This is useful, for example, if you've installed a newer version of a scripting language and you want your plug-in to use the newer interpreter to execute your services.


Developing Plug-ins

For more information about creating plug-ins for Bellhop, you can download the Bellhop SDK disk image, which contains the plug-in projects for the Ruby and AppleScript context plug-ins, the necessary headers and some documentation.