---
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 seamlessly, 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>
      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="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="get-started">Getting started</h2>
  <div class="content">
	Amber is shipped as a <a href="http://npmjs.org">npm</a> package for its CLI tools and as a <a href="http://bower.io/">bower</a> package for the client-side.

	<pre>
	# Install the CLI tool `amber`
	npm install -g amber

	# Initialize your project as bower package
	cd /path/to/myproject
	bower init

	# Load amber via bower in your project
	bower install amber --save

	# Serve amber on localhost:4000
	amber serve
	</pre>

	The <a href="https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber/wiki/Getting-started">Getting started</a> page shows more details on ways to obtain Amber and start a project.
  </div>
</div>