Thanks for all this good energy nicolas! Keep pushing :) Stef On Jan 16, 2012, at 1:06 AM, Nicolas Petton wrote:
About 4 moons have passed and Amber - the Smalltalk for the web - has during that time moved forward quite a lot. Since the 0.9 release back in september we have made about 250 commits and closed 52 issues of about 75 reported during these months.
Now with over 43 forks on github and more than 230 followers the project:
...is live and kicking!
A lot of cool stuff is being done in those forks and not in the master repository, like for example the gaming framework called Ludus by Bernat Romagosa:
https://github.com/bromagosa/amber/tree/ludus
...or Ambrhino by Stefan Krecher - Amber running in Rhino:
https://github.com/StefanKrecher/Ambrhino
So, why would you take a look at Amber?
In our opinion Amber is perfectly positioned for the HTML5 onslaught and the explosion of all-things-javascript like for example Nodejs.
Amber plays very well with others and can seamlessly use Javascript libraries! It's a *real* Smalltalk, the environment is all there including Workspace, Transcript, Browser, senders/implementors/references to class, TestRunner, Inspectors, code editing with syntax coloring and a Debugger. There is no image or interpreter, all compilation is incremental.
JavaScript is quite a broken language with lots of traps and odd quirks. It is the assembler of the Internet and we love it for that, but we don't want to write applications in it. Smalltalk is immensely cleaner, both syntactically and semantically with a simple class model and a lightweight syntax for closures. It is in many ways a perfect match for the Good Parts of JavaScript.
And having a true live interactive incremental development environment where you can build your application directly in the browser is unbeatable...
Below follows a summary of the major changes since release 0.9. We hope you join us in developing Amber and having fun! Fork at github, join in #amber-lang on freenode and hop onto the mailing list.
regards, Nicolas & Göran ...and a BIG thanks to everyone that are involved in the project! ---------------------------------------------
Here's a summary of changes since the 0.9 release:
- 80 new unit tests written - 52 issues fixed - All classes in Kernel-Objects, Kernel-Classes and Kernel-Methods has been documented - New documentation framework (see http://amber-lang.net/documentation.html) - Better class organisations, "Kernel" package split into several packages - First class packages have replaced class categories - Internet Explorer 7+ compatibility - New Announcement framework ported from Pharo - New console-based REPL written in Amber using node.js - Symbol class implemented together with object identity and #== - New OrderedCollection and Set implementation - Dictionary can now have any kind of object as keys. String-key dictionary has been renamed HashedCollection - New TwitterWall example - Improved HTML Canvas, now compatible with IE7 - Improved JSObjectProxy for seemless JavaScript objects access from Amber - No more jQuery binding. Amber is fully capable of sending messages to JavaScript objects
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