The html5 revolution
Sebastian Sastre
Amber Milan Eskridge
Dale Henrichs
Amber gets popular because of Smalltalk.
Smalltalk is half programming language and half development environment ... I know that I love Smalltalk because it brings me in close contact with the objects that I'm working with ... debuggers and inspectors are as important as the language itself ...
Smalltalk suffers from a peculiar problem ... I'm tempted to call it something like the Shangri-La paradox ...
It is fairly well known that you must work hard to get to know and appreciate Smalltalk ... You struggle and
struggle and then one day you see the joy of Smalltalk ... However, once you have become a Smalltalk devotee
you want to do everything in Smalltalk and "never leave" ... as a consequence not many folks spend time
improving the route to Smalltalk ... it is left as a rocky hard route for the next person to discover...
I'm not sure that I can articulate all of the little problems that make the route into and out of Smalltalk difficult...As usual these kinds of problems are not the sexy ones, they're the ones like cleaning toilets and sweeping in the corners:)
However, I can say that Amber has addressed the "Smalltalk does not play well with other languages" very neatly by making access to javascript nearly seamless ... I appreciate Amber, because I can use google to find the solution to a problem in ajax or javascript and it is very simple to translate that solution into smalltalk ... so for me I get the best of both worlds:
leveraging the javascript libraries while working in Smalltalk
This is a real important aspect of Amber that needs to be preserved ...
With regards to HTML5 I would think that if the Amber development environment for HTML5 applications was superior then that would attract more developers to Amber ...
Dale
Bernat Romagosa
Bernat Romagosa.
H. Hirzel
Yes, HTML5 is changing things --- gradually. People have to absorb the
new options.
Amber can make use of this. It can directly use JavaScript constructs
and new browser features and thus make use of HTML5.
HTML5 is often used as a cover term for first the HTML5 standard
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ as such but as well for ECMA5script
(released 2009,
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/
ECMA-262) and CSS3. There was no ECMA4script specification release.
Version 5 directly follows the version 3 of 1999.
IE9 supports HTML5 in this sense and all other modern web browsers do
it as well.
If you do not care about supporting IE8 and earlier web programming is
a lot less complex. You can focus on using the web standards. They are
comprehensive these days.
Going for IE9 only is actually doable as
IE9 was released in March 2011 and runs on Windows 7. Windows 7 came
out in October 2009. So people with a machine not older than 30 months
are ready to use HTML5 if they want to stay within the Microsoft
world. All others have to install Firefox, Chrome or something else
and can still go for HTML5
More links to HTML5 including a freely accessible online book by O’Reilly
http://cnx.org/content/m41186/latest/
(feedback and questions are welcome)
--Hannes
Sebastian Sastre
Amber Milan Eskridge
you're missing the point.
The story here is that you can use whatever you like to ride that wave. Who cares about popularity of a technology? you only should care about the popularity of your products.
In terms of technology, everything is niche these days. And people don't care what you're using.
But this is going to change the game because fatty server side frameworks are dead (or zombies) so Amber is a real player in the new arena.
html5 is the revolutionthe servers' API are the new filesystem and the browser is the new hardware
Larry Trutter
On Tuesday, April 10, 2012 1:08:26 PM UTC-5, Hannes wrote:
laurent laffont
Laurent
Amber Milan Eskridge
Pat Maddox
Amber works with git and deploys as JS files. It's easy. We've seen a
growing interest in Javascript flavorings like CoffeeScript and
ClojureScript. This means that people are not satisfied with boring
Javascript. If they want something better, Smalltalk presents
interesting and appealing possibilities.
From my experience with it so far, Amber offers the best development
environment for creating browser-based Javascript software. I think it
could take off and be an important project for web-based development.
Integrating with new browser features will be important for it to
succeed. This being open source I expect that we'll see energy go into
whatever areas people feel will benefit them most. Presumably for some
that means HTML5 support as it progresses.
Pat
Pat Maddox
wrote:
> In terms of technology, *everything is niche these days*. And people don't
more press and attention from particular sorts of investors than other
technologies do. 37signals first made good products. Then they rode
the wave of interest in Rails to boost their standing in the technical
and business communities.
"The end user" may not care about about the technology used during her
day-to-day dealings with your software, but "the end user" is a real
person who may very well benefit from knowing what technologies are in
use today.
> But this is going to change the game because fatty server side frameworks
> are dead (or zombies) so Amber is a real player in the new arena.
>
> the servers' API are the new filesystem and the browser is the new hardware
software. Amber is a great tool for that.
Cheers,
Pat
Sebastian Sastre
Nicolas Petton
http://www.nicolas-petton.fr
H. Hirzel
> Amber works with git and deploys as JS files.
I think this is the main point. And it confirms what Milan Eskridge wrote:
"JavaScript got popular because of browsers."
Amber as it is deployed is JavaScript. This is not particularly
exciting, but useful and makes it "acceptable".
The exciting point is that Amber offers a good IDE. Something what
JavaScript cannot offer.
Though there are efforts to go in this direction, e.g. Scratchpad in
Firefox is something like a workspace. And the web console serves as a
Transcript window.
-- Hannes
Amber Milan Eskridge
Amber as it is deployed is JavaScript. This is not particularly
exciting, but useful and makes it "acceptable".
The exciting point is that Amber offers a good IDE. Something what
JavaScript cannot offer.
Though there are efforts to go in this direction, e.g. Scratchpad in
Firefox is something like a workspace. And the web console serves as a
Transcript window.
I'd add that Amber offers a convient and well thought-out class libary. For example: Underscore.js is not needed in Amber.
Being Smalltalk, Amber delivers powers equal to linq with no effort as well. That is very nice.
H. Hirzel
http://joshduck.com/periodic-table.html
Sebastien Audier
A nice overview of the elements of HTML5
http://joshduck.com/periodic-table.html
+1
Sébastien AUDIER
S.A.R.L Objectfusion
Applications web, consulting, design,
site Internet, Promotion de projets.
Tom
On 10 Apr., 17:55, Amber Milan Eskridge
<amber.eskri...@googlemail.com> wrote:
...
> Amber gets popular because of ..? Which niche does Amber fill? An answer we
> might like to give.
>
development environment for both, abstract classes and concrete living
objects. It lets you design your code right there, where it would be
executed later. I don't know of any other web programming environment,
being so compact and so straight forward object oriented AND so
direct.
Sure, there are lots of improvements, a refactoring browser, possibly
class based committing besides package based, better inpection of
blocks, multiple committable workspaces (read/write on the server),
"File in" from the server, etc...
Cheers...