amber

Amber

By Nicolas Petton [e-mail] and Amber contributors

Amber is an implementation of the Smalltalk language that runs on top of the JavaScript runtime. It is designed to make client-side development faster and easier.

Overview

Amber is written in itself, including the parser and compiler. Amber compiles into efficient JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the equivalent JavaScript. There is no interpretation at runtime.

Some highlights:

• Amber features an IDE with a Class browser, Workspace, Transcript, a ReferencesBrowser supporting senders/implementors and class references, basic Inspector and even a beginning of a Debugger and a unit TestRunner.
• Pharo Smalltalk is considered as the reference implementation.
• Amber includes a canvas to generate HTML, like Seaside
• Amber can use Javascript libraries and the current IDE is built on jQuery
• You can inline Javascript code and there are many ways to interact between Amber and Javascript

License

Amber is released under the MIT license. All contributions made for inclusion are considered to be under MIT.

Building Amber

Amber uses Grunt.js as build system since version 0.10.0.

If you already have Grunt.js v0.3.x installed locally run the following (otherwise ignore these lines):

cd ${Amber_DIR}
npm uninstall grunt

To install Grunt.js v0.4.x on the commandline execute the following commands:

npm install -g grunt-cli grunt-init

Amber depends on some web libraries to work in browser, using bower to manage these dependencies. To install bower, run:

npm install -g bower

To get all dependencies, run:

cd ${Amber_DIR}
bower install   # dependencies for the web
npm install     # dependencies for the cli development

And finally, compile Amber using the following command:

cd ${Amber_DIR}
grunt

For Windows support check the Grunt.js on Windows page.

More infos

More on the project page