Amber Smalltalk
An ancient flying insect caught in amber.
|
|
| Original author(s) | Nicolas Petton |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Amber Community |
| Initial release | September 13, 2011 |
| Stable release |
0.15.1 / February 6, 2016
|
| Repository | lolg |
| Development status | Active |
| Written in | Smalltalk, JavaScript |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Platform | Web browser |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Object-oriented programming language, IDE |
| License | MIT |
| Website | www |
Amber Smalltalk, formerly named Jtalk, is an implementation of the Smalltalk-80 language that runs on the JavaScript runtime of a web browser. It is designed to enable client-side development using the Smalltalk programming language. The programming environment in Amber is named Helios.
Amber includes an integrated development environment (IDE) with a class browser, Workspace, transcript, object inspector, and debugger. Amber is written in itself (is self-hosting), including the compiler, and compiles into JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the JavaScript equivalent. This one-to-one mapping with JavaScript differentiates Amber from other Smalltalk variants such as Pharo, Seaside, and Squeak. Starting the Amber IDE requires Node.js. Amber doesn't run slowly on a bytecode virtual machine due to its convenient mapping to JavaScript, which makes compiled code run fast.
Amber was originally created by Nicolas Petton in 2011. Amber was influenced by an earlier Smalltalk in browser project, named Clamato, created by Avi Bryant. Amber and Clamato both use parsing expression grammar (PEG) libraries to parse Smalltalk source code. Amber uses the JavaScript based PEG.js library written by David Majda. Clamato uses PetitParser, a Smalltalk-based library written by Lukas Renggli. Clamato and Amber were both influenced by earlier work by Dan Ingalls in developing the Lively Kernel implementation of Morphic to run in web browsers via JavaScript.
Starting with version 0.12.0, Amber modules compile to asynchronous module definition (AMD). Starting with version 0.12.6, the development helper command-line interface (CLI) tool is extracted to dedicated module amber-cli, which can be installed from npm; and setting up the project and its JavaScript ecosystem (bower, npm, grunt) is greatly simplified using this CLI tool by issuing amber init and answering a few questions. This makes setting Amber Smalltalk easier for people with little JavaScript experience.
...
Wikipedia