Amber with Silk - Wednesday, February 24th

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 The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, February 24th.

 

Christian Haider will guide us in a tour of the Amber dialect of Smalltalk and its Silk web framework.

In his own words...

Amber, created by Nicolas Petton, is a Smalltalk implemented in JavaScript running in a web browser. Silk, written by the Amber maintainer Herby Vojčík, is a web framework in Amber. 
 

I was looking for a good solution for the web for a long time. At the last ESUG, I was bugging everybody about a Smalltalk in the browser, because I decided to redo the frontend of my current project in Smalltalk instead of JavaScript. There were some developments, but only Amber was available. So I tried it for real on a little side project (sources) to see if this route is viable - spoiler: it is!
 

Silk, the web framework, caught my attention and I fell in love with it. Silk is very simple, straight forward and powerful, just the properties I love Smalltalk for. A Silk is basically a facade for a DOM node in the browser allowing the programmer to build up and manipulate the DOM in a direct way. Silk is so easy and intuitive that it never stood in the way and just worked. So, I could just concentrate on the complexities of the web (and the app).
 

In this presentation I will walk you through the setup, show you the Amber tools and explore what you can do with Silk. I will try to justify my enthusiasm and appreciation for Silk :-).

About me: My name is Christian Haider and I use Smalltalk since the mid-90s. Fortunately, I earn my living with Smalltalk and use it on a daily bases (mostly VisualWorks). I like programming UIs and graphics. My largest open source contribution is a PDF library, the most significant one is Values.

Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, this will be an online meeting from home.

If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!
 
Update 11 March 2021: Part 1 and part 2 of the presentation is now available on Vimeo.

Comments

Jiri said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
30 March 2021 at 15:55
Jiri said…
Wonderful demo!

There is a mention about Visual Works as one of the most productive development environments available on this planet on the GitHub page for CoViD19UI project which was used to demo Amber.

I wonder – could that be elaborated? Perhaps in another demo.

Thanks,
Jiri
30 March 2021 at 15:57
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