AppleScript under 10.7 Lion

Question

Hello everyone,
first, I am a beginner with apple and mac os.
I have wrote a script for 10.6 to use the spellchecker within my Java-Program:
tell application "Automator Runner"
   set mySpellChecker to call method "sharedSpellChecker" of class "NSSpellChecker"
   set foundLanguages to call method "availableLanguages" of mySpellChecker
end tell
which works nice under 10.6
But now under 10.7 even under the applescript console an error occurs at:
tell application "Automator Runner"
   set mySpellChecker to call method "sharedSpellChecker" of class "NSSpellChecker"
   set foundWords to call method "availableLanguages" of mySpellChecker
end tell
>  Expected end of line but found identifier.
Can anyone please give me a hint, what has changed from 10.6 to 10.7. In the Changelog I cant find either an AppleScript change or a change with the spellchecker API. Also other scripts from the web using the "to call method ..." fails with the same error.
Thanks for any reply in advice
Michael Coldewey

Answer 1

That Automator Runner trick was just a way to access Cocoa methods via its AppleScript Studio terminology - in your case, call method.  In Lion, the AppleScript Editor can use AppleScriptObjC (introduced in Snow Leopard), which calls Cocoa methods directly.  ASOC is the current framework, so Apple has been gradually removing the old AppleScript Studio stuff (which is deprecated) to "encourage" its use.
There are a couple of ways to use AppleScriptObjC in your script.  The first is to create a new Cocoa-AppleScript Applet from AppleSccript Editor's File > New from Template menu item - this is the easiest, but you can't run your script from the Editor (you need to run the applet), which makes debugging a bit of a pain.  The second way is to use the ASObjC Runner background application, which can be run from the AppleScript Editor (it also takes care of coercing results from Cocoa methods to their respective AppleScript classes).  Either way, your script snippet would look something like (including coercing the resulting NSArray to a list):
set mySpellChecker to current application's NSSpellChecker's sharedSpellChecker()
mySpellChecker's availableLanguages() as list