Some AppleScript from Java Applet no longer work with Mavericks

Question

I have an issue with the latest MacOS X version: Mavericks. I used to call AppleScript from a Java applet and everything worked fine on MacOS X 10.7.5. Going to Mavericks, I had to make few changes to make AppleScriptEngine reachable again but even then, the scripts I'm running are returning an error.

Here is what I tried: My little piece of code:

private static final String SCRIPT = 
          "try\n"
        + "  tell application \"Finder\"\n"
        + "    delay 5\n"
        + "    if exists application file id \"XCEL\" then return \"Excel found\"\n"
        + "  end tell\n"
        + "on error errStr number errorNumber\n"
        + "  error errStr number errorNumber\n"
        + "end try";

static void checkAppleScript() {
    ScriptEngineManager mgr = new ScriptEngineManager();
    ScriptEngine appleScript = mgr.getEngineByName("AppleScript");
    if (appleScript != null) {
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "AppleScript found: " + appleScript);
        try {
            JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, appleScript.eval(SCRIPT));
        } catch (ScriptException se) {
            JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, se.getMessage());
        }
    } else {
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "NO AppleScript engine");
    }
}

I put this in a signed jar file with following attributes in the manifest:

• Trusted-Library: true
• Application-Name: TestingAppleScript
• Permissions: all-permissions
• Codebase: *

When I'm running a test class from the java command line, Excel is found on both MacOS X 10.7.5 and 10.9.1.

When I'm running a test applet from Safari, Excel is still found on MacOS X 10.7.5 but on 10.9.1 I got an error message: "Finder got an error: application isn't running".

I saw that this error may result in a too fast execution of the script, this is why I added the 5 seconds delay in my script but it does not solve the issue.

As I don't have any more ideas to try, I hope that someone will be able to help.

Answer 1

I finally found what was blocking: there is a security option in Safari to indicate that the Java plugin can run in unsafe mode for a given server. Activating this solved my issue.