README.md 3.0 KB
Amber 
By Nicolas Petton petton.nicolas@gmail.com 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.
\o/ Call for contributors! \o/
The core project of Amber has enough resources, but:
- the Helios IDE (https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/helios), as well as
- examples (https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber-examples), and
- documentation (https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber-documentation
would need some of your care.
Thank you very much! ? (see CONTRIBUTING.md for further details)
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
Getting Amber
Amber is shipped as a npm package for its CLI tools and as a bower package for the client-side. For installation to work, you need to install node, npm and git (in Windows, use Git for Windows and select "Run Git from Windows Command Prompt" and "Checkout Windows-style, commit Unix-style" installation options).
# Install the CLI tool `amber-cli`
npm install -g amber-cli
# Initialize your project (directory must be empty)
cd /path/to/myproject
amber init
# Serve amber on localhost:4000
amber serve
The Getting started page shows more details on ways to obtain Amber and start a project.
Building Amber
This step is only used by people developing Amber itself. Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for further details. It explains the Amber development setup and how to contribute.
License
Amber is released under the MIT license. All contributions made for inclusion are considered to be under MIT.
More infos
More on the project page