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[Help-smalltalk] [ANN] Amber Smalltalk 0.9.1 is out!


From: Nicolas Petton
Subject: [Help-smalltalk] [ANN] Amber Smalltalk 0.9.1 is out!
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:06:44 +0100

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:

        http://www.amber-lang.net

...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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