Bring app to front... without activate?

Question

is there a way to make a current running app the front app without using activate... or to tell activate to NOT open the app if its not open... or... well
heres my problem...
I'll have a few apps on my machine of different versions while testing stuff. messing with Wine apps and X11 and stuff, a lot of times things get thrown to the back, so i want to give a simple command to OSX that can bring it to the front as the active app.
using...
osascript -e "tell application \"AppName\" to activate"
usually makes it come up front... but the problem is occasionally if I have a different app on the computer that has the same name and preferences file, that it instead opens that app up and tries to run it, throwing the app i wanted in the background...
so basically I want a way to activate an app as the main app simply, but to find the current running app, not try to open any other apps that aren't open...
using osascript I didn't want to make it super complicated checking whats running and names and all kinds of logic just to decide what to activate. I'm thinking there has to be a simpler way to do this, with Applescript or some other way....
any help is appreciated

Answer 1

the problem is timing... and I don't want to use any type of delay/sleep commands, I want it to go as soon as it can... going for speed.
The problem is... my app has to run multiple other apps and many processes. What I have to do is have an app launch in the background (an X11 build actually, not default X11.app), and then do some other things... then the final results are all running in the X11 app, so I need to bring it back to the front most application. The problem is, the place my script gets to, to wait for the X11 app, the X11 app is not always finished loading completely. If i tell it to activate to bring it back up front, and its fully done loading, then it works fine. Times when its not fully done loading (usually just a second or less away), OSX goes and finds another app with the same name and ID and launches it instead.... sometimes...
This will lead to rare and annoying bugs with my app... though most of the time it would work fine. On older, slower machines it messes up most of the time.
I have started using tell application id "$APPIDNUMBER"
I tried this in the bash script
/usr/bin/osascript <<END
repeat
if application id "$IDNAME" is running
tell application id "$IDNAME" to activate
exit repeat
end if
end repeat
END
so it basically set in a loop until that program was running. The bash script its running out of works fine on 10.5 and 10.6 doing that as far as I could tell, but only when running it directly, which doesn't happen, when it was opened from another process, it gets stuck in the loop forever, no matter what the id does.... it also didn't work at all on 10.4, it apparently doesn't understand "is running"
so trying to find a way to do this only when the app is actually running, to tell it to activate... without using arbitrary wait states... cuz that leads to problems, especially for portability and longevity....