By Nicolas Petton [email protected] 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.
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
Amber is released under the MIT license. All contributions made for inclusion are considered to be under MIT.
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
cd ${Amber_DIR}
npm install
And finally, compile Amber using the following command:
cd ${Amber_DIR}
grunt
For Windows support check the Grunt.js on Windows page.
More on the project page