First impression ...

[Marten Feldtmann]

I just wanted to summarize my first impression after working a few days with Amber:

First I would like to say, that I am a Smalltalker and not a Javascript person and I see Javascript in this area as some kind of C compiler to get connection to other libraries.

After all: this stuff has the capability to change the web world for Smalltalker - but that still seems to be a long way to go.

But to go into details:

Perhaps I must say, that I know ENVY and this drives all my source code management wishes:

-> editions of methods, packages  (ENVY)
-> prerequisites of packages (to be able to deploy and check the code) (ENVY)
-> the most annoying error in the current master code is the problem with method categories.
-> then copy/paste via mouse would be nice
-> some other stuff is at least strange: access to instance variables within inlined javascript code is not working as expected
-> source code management should be changed
-> more docs about deployment, javascript <-> Smalltalk interaction
-> better examples how to do clean rendering
-> is the need of jquery ok ?
-> debugging is at this stage difficult
-> I press "commit" after any changes I enter into the code widget (tedious work)

and so on and so on. But I still get the feeling, that it could change the WWW-world of Smalltalkers as Seaside did it some years ago.

[Marten Feldtmann]

I have an additional ones:

- limited support for base Smalltalk classes. I would expect to have at least all classes and methods in the ANSI standard
- how does rendering work at all ?

[Nicolas Petton]

Thanks for reporting your first impressions :)
Amber is a community effort and we can all together improve it and get
where we want.

Maybe you could help with some of the issues you are facing?

Nico

--
Nicolas Petton
http://nicolas-petton.fr

[Marten Feldtmann]

... and additional ones: speed.

I've been written some demos for HbbTV devices using amber and the loading time of the source code seems to be a major problem - and those Javascript interpreters are slow.

[Tom]

I'd also appreciate more examples or better recipes showing how to
organize page structures.

My own async approach is a topdown design into a new page class.

Have a look at:

http://tcltalk.ath.cx/amber/examples/tb-pages

To get the source, click on 'IDE' and select the category 'TB-Pages'.

Tom