Amber Smalltalk

Amber Smalltalk
Original author(s) Nicolas Petton
Developer(s) Amber Community
Initial release 2011
Stable release 0.14.2 / January 11, 2015
Development status Active
Written in Smalltalk, JavaScript
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Object-oriented programming language, IDE
License MIT license
Website www.amber-lang.net

Amber Smalltalk, formerly known as 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.[1]

Amber includes an integrated development environment with a class browser, workspace, transcript, object inspector and debugger. Amber is written in itself, including the compiler, and compiles into JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the JavaScript equivalent. Amber was created by Nicolas Petton.[2]

Amber was influenced by an earlier Smalltalk in browser project, called "Clamato", created by Avi Bryant.[2][3] Both Amber and Clamato use Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG) libraries for parsing Smalltalk sourcecode. Amber uses the JavaScript based PEG.js library [4][5] written by David Majda and Clamato uses PetitParser, a Smalltalk based library written by Lukas Renggli.[2] Both Clamato and Amber were influenced by earlier work by Dan Ingalls in developing the Lively Kernel implementation of Morphic in the web browser using JavaScript.[2][6]

See also

References

  1. Smalltalk Implementations (brief comparative summaries describing Smalltalk dialects)
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Schuster, Werner (August 22, 2011). "Smalltalk IDEs Come to the Browser: Jtalk, tODE, Lively Kernel 2.0". Retrieved October 20, 2011.
  3. "Clamato". (Home page for the Clamato Smalltalk project)
  4. "PEG.js". (Home page for the PEG.js JavaScript parser generator project)
  5. "Amber 0.9 Announcement". (Announcement email of Amber 0.9 includes switch to PEG.js)
  6. Shuster, Werner (June 22, 2010). "Dan Ingalls on the History of Smalltalk and the Lively Kernel". Retrieved October 26, 2011.

External links