A new language and live environment made for the web.

The Amber language is deeply inspired by Smalltalk. It is designed to make client-side development faster and easier. Amber includes a live development environment with a class browser, workspace, unit test runner, transcript, object inspector and debugger.

Amber is written in itself, including the compiler, and compiles into efficient JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the JS equivalent.

The app is in Amber Smalltalk and the html is done with Silk. Silk is very exciting and makes web programming fun again. I am completely enthusiastic about it 🙂 ! ‑‑ @c_haider, on making covidcrt.uber.space website.

Amber...

So...What is it about again?

Amber is a language (derived from Smalltalk) and environment built for the web.

With Amber, client-side web development finally gets the power and productivity that exists in other Smalltalk dialects.

Why should I care?

Having a true live & incremental development environment where you can build your application interactively in the browser is unbeatable.

Why a Smalltalk dialect?

Smalltalk stands head and shoulders above most other languages for clarity, conciseness, and human-friendliness.

As a language, it is immensely clean and mature, both syntactically and semantically. It is a pure OO language, with objects all the way down.

But what about all the JS ecosystem?

Amber plays very well with the outer world. You can interact with JavaScript objects seamlessly, and even inspect them as any Amber object.

Evaluating JavaScript object methods is transparent and makes using libraries a breeze.

It's a 3D WebGL game engine that is very easy to get to work with Amber. Specifically though I am using its WebVR integration. This is a pretty nice way to do VR development. Being able to take the headset off, change a method, and then put the headset back on without having to restart is pretty nice. ‑‑ @ZenChess, on using babylon.js in Amber

Getting started

Follow the README in git.

Get involved!

Meet the people behind Amber

Contributing to the project

In a sharing mood? Contributions to Amber are very much welcome!

  • The Amber source code is hosted on lolg.it. You can fork the main repository and send pull requests.
  • You can also submit issues on the bug tracker.

Mentions

Thanks for creating Amber: Nicolas Petton.

Thanks for supporting Amber: – they reward open-source contributors a free license of VAST.

Amber is developed mostly in , a privacy-oriented browser from JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, that blocks ads and trackers.