---
layout: index
title: Amber Smalltalk
---


<div class="box">
  
  <h2>Amber...</h2>

  <dl>
    <dt>So...What is it about again?</dt>
    <dd>
      <p>Amber is a language (derived from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk">Smalltalk</a>) and environment built for the web.</p>
With Amber, client-side web development finally gets the power and productivity that exists in other Smalltalk dialects.</p>
    </dd>

    <dt>Why should I care?</dt>
    <dd>
      <p>Having a true live & incremental development environment where you can build your application interactively in the browser is unbeatable.</p>
    </dd>

    <dt>Why a Smalltalk dialect?</dt>
    <dd>
      <p>Smalltalk stands head and shoulders above most other languages for clarity, conciseness, and human-friendliness.</p>
      <p>As a language, it is immensely clean and mature, both syntactically and semantically. It is a pure OO language, with objects all the way down.</p>
    </dd>

    <dt>But what about all the JS ecosystem?</dt>
    <dd>
      <p>Amber plays very well with the outer world. You can interact with JavaScript objects seemlessly, and even inspect them as any Amber object.</p>
      <p><a href="https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber/wiki/From-smalltalk-to-javascript-and-back">Evaluating JavaScript object methods</a> is transparent and makes using libraries a breeze.</p>
    </dd>

    <dt>Quick links</dt>
    <dd>
      You can read the <a href="documentation.html"> documentation</a> online. The <a href="https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber/wiki">Wiki on GitHub</a> includes a <a href="https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber/wiki/Getting-started">Getting started</a> tutorial for OSX, Linux and Windows.
    </dd>

  </dl>

</div>

<div class="box" id="getstarted">

  <h2>Client-side usage</h2>
  <div class="content">
    <p>Load the full Amber Smalltalk environment with the IDE in your page:</p> 
    
    {% highlight html %}<script src="js/amber.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"> loadAmber()</script>{% endhighlight %}

    <p>Or the deployment JavaScript file only (without the Smalltalk sources, parser, compiler and IDE):</p>
    {% highlight html %}<script src="js/amber.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"> loadAmber({deploy: true})</script>{% endhighlight %}

    <p>Read the <a href="documentation.html">documentation</a> to learn more about writing applications in Amber.</p>
  </div>
</div>


<div class="box" id="getinvolved">
  <h2> Get involved!</h2>

  <h3>Contributing to the project</h3>
  <p>In a sharing mood? Contributions to Amber are very much welcome!</p>
  <ul>
    <li>The Amber source code is hosted on <a href="https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber">Github</a>. You can fork the main repository and send pull requests.</li>
    <li>The <a href="https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber/wiki/Contributions">contributions</a> page lists some possible contributions that which contributors might "adopt" and realize.</li>
    <li>You can also submit issues on the <a href="https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber/issues?sort=created&state=open">bug tracker</a>.</li>
  </ul>

  <h3>Meet the people behind Amber</h3>
  <ul>
    <li>Most of Amber discussion and help happens on the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/amber-lang"> Google Group</a>.</li>
    <li>Amber hackers can be found on the #amber-lang IRC channel on freenode. You can use the <a href="http://webchat.freenode.net/">Freenode web client</a>.</li>
  </ul>
</div>
<div class="box last">
  <h2 id="download">Download</h2>
  <div class="content">
    <p>You can get a copy of Amber from github or clone the <a href="http://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber">git repository</a>.</p> 
    <a href="http://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber/zipball/master">
      <img border="0" width="90" src="http://github.com/images/modules/download/zip.png"></a>
    <a href="http://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber/tarball/master">
      <img border="0" width="90" src="http://github.com/images/modules/download/tar.png"></a>
  </div>
</div>