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Amber Smalltalk
Dialect of the Smalltalk programming language

Amber Smalltalk, formerly named Jtalk, is an implementation of the programming language Smalltalk-80, that runs on the JavaScript runtime of a web browser. It is designed to enable client-side development using Smalltalk. The programming environment in Amber is named Helios.

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Key features

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.3 This one-to-one mapping with JavaScript differentiates Amber from other Smalltalk variants such as Pharo, Seaside, and Squeak.4 Developing Amber project requires Node.js to run the tooling; the deployed project only needs browser to run. Amber doesn't run slowly on a bytecode virtual machine due to its convenient mapping to JavaScript, which makes compiled code run fast.

History

Amber was originally created by Nicolas Petton in 2011.5 Amber was influenced by an earlier Smalltalk in browser project, named Clamato, created by Avi Bryant.678 Amber and Clamato both use parsing expression grammar (PEG) libraries to parse Smalltalk source code. Amber uses the JavaScript based PEG.js library910 written by David Majda. Clamato uses PetitParser, a Smalltalk-based library written by Lukas Renggli.11 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.1213

Starting with version 0.12.0, Amber modules compile to asynchronous module definition (AMD).14 Starting with version 0.12.6, the development helper command-line interface (CLI) tool is extracted to dedicated module, which can be installed from npm as @ambers/cli; and setting up the project and its JavaScript ecosystem (npm, grunt) is greatly simplified using this CLI tool by issuing amber init and answering a few questions.15 Since August 2018, project scaffolding of "amber init" is simplified, not using bower any more and only based on npm and whole project resides under npm organization @ambers. This makes setting Amber Smalltalk easier for people with little JavaScript experience.16

Installing

Up-to-date instructions should be at https://lolg.it/amber/amber.

To install Amber, Git must be installed first, if it is not already. The following commands will install Amber:17

# for macOS and Linux, needs the following two commands: npm config set prefix=~/npm export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/npm/bin" # add to .bash_profile or .bashrc npm install -g grunt-cli grunt-init @ambers/cli

To create a new project, write:

# Create the empty project dir mkdir example-project cd example-project # Create and initialize a new Amber project amber init

"amber init" step will lead to some questions about the project. For most of them, a default answer can be set. The next step is to start the server:

amber serve

After that, typing http://localhost:4000 in the browser will get to the application. Most browsers will block Helios IDE pop-ups by default, so browser settings may need changing to allow the Helios IDE popup to appear.

Integrating external JavaScript libraries

Npm software can be used to access a vast array of JavaScript libraries. A library can be integrated by following only four steps:18

  1. Install the library using npm.
  2. If 'local.amd.json' files doesn't exist for the npm package, create a 'libname.amd.json' file in the project root.
  3. Run 'grunt devel' (or 'grunt deploy' if ready to deploy an application).
  4. Add 'libname' to the application package's #imports: .

Deployment

By running grunt deploy, the Amber project is packaged using RequireJS into just a few files, at the minimum just index.html and the.js, which can be hosted statically as any other static web page.

See also

  • Free and open-source software portal

References

  1. Smalltalk Implementations (brief comparative summaries describing Smalltalk dialects) https://sites.google.com/a/world.st/worldofst/try/implementations ↩

  2. Eng, Richard (2015-06-09). "A Gentle Introduction to Amber: Engaging in Smalltalk with Her, Reads Like English, and It's Still Succinct!, "It's alive! It's alive!", The All-seeing Helios, Testing D3". Medium. Retrieved 2016-02-07. https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/a-gentle-introduction-to-amber-8c532631e9ab#.dcps4c7i2 ↩

  3. Petton, Nicolas. "Amber Smalltalk". amber-lang.net. Retrieved 2016-01-30. http://amber-lang.net/ ↩

  4. Smalltalk Implementations (brief comparative summaries describing Smalltalk dialects) https://sites.google.com/a/world.st/worldofst/try/implementations ↩

  5. Schuster, Werner (August 22, 2011). "Smalltalk IDEs Come to the Browser: Jtalk, tODE, Lively Kernel 2.0". Retrieved October 20, 2011. http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/08/smalltalk-in-browser ↩

  6. Schuster, Werner (August 22, 2011). "Smalltalk IDEs Come to the Browser: Jtalk, tODE, Lively Kernel 2.0". Retrieved October 20, 2011. http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/08/smalltalk-in-browser ↩

  7. "Clamato". (Clamato Smalltalk project website) http://clamato.net/ ↩

  8. Petton, Nicolas (August 2011). Jtalk, the Smalltalk for Web developers. European Smalltalk User Group Conference (ESUG). Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom. Archived from the original on 2012-01-28. Slides. https://web.archive.org/web/20120128093526/http://nicolas-petton.fr/presentations/esug2011/ ↩

  9. Majda, David (2010–2016). "PEG.js: Parser Generator for JavaScript". PEG.js.org. David Majda. Archived from the original on 27 April 2011. Retrieved 13 November 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20110427185009/http://pegjs.majda.cz/ ↩

  10. Petton, Nicolas (13 September 2011). "Bye, bye Jtalk... Hello Amber!". Google Groups. Google, Inc. Retrieved 13 November 2016. ... we are now making a first release humbly numbered 0.9. We are also taking the opportunity to pick a slicker name for Jtalk - Amber! https://groups.google.com/d/topic/amber-lang/FsuX8geVXpk/discussion ↩

  11. Schuster, Werner (August 22, 2011). "Smalltalk IDEs Come to the Browser: Jtalk, tODE, Lively Kernel 2.0". Retrieved October 20, 2011. http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/08/smalltalk-in-browser ↩

  12. Schuster, Werner (August 22, 2011). "Smalltalk IDEs Come to the Browser: Jtalk, tODE, Lively Kernel 2.0". Retrieved October 20, 2011. http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/08/smalltalk-in-browser ↩

  13. Shuster, Werner (June 22, 2010). "Dan Ingalls on the History of Smalltalk and the Lively Kernel". Retrieved October 26, 2011. http://www.infoq.com/interviews/ingalls-smalltalk ↩

  14. "amber-smalltalk/amber". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-01-30. https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber/wiki/Migration-from-0.11-to-0.12 ↩

  15. "amber-smalltalk/amber". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-01-30. https://github.com/amber-smalltalk/amber ↩

  16. Petton, Nicolas. "Installing Amber". Amber-lang.net. Retrieved 2016-01-30. http://docs.amber-lang.net/installing-amber.html ↩

  17. Eng, Richard (2015-06-09). "A Gentle Introduction to Amber: Engaging in Smalltalk with Her, Reads Like English, and It's Still Succinct!, "It's alive! It's alive!", The All-seeing Helios, Testing D3". Medium. Retrieved 2016-02-07. https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/a-gentle-introduction-to-amber-8c532631e9ab#.dcps4c7i2 ↩

  18. Eng, Richard (2015-06-09). "A Gentle Introduction to Amber: Engaging in Smalltalk with Her, Reads Like English, and It's Still Succinct!, "It's alive! It's alive!", The All-seeing Helios, Testing D3". Medium. Retrieved 2016-02-07. https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/a-gentle-introduction-to-amber-8c532631e9ab#.dcps4c7i2 ↩