One of things that very much annoy me with Amber is its installation , if Pharo is installation heaven because it does not need an install , installation of Amber is far from ideal especially if you are not familiar with web dev. Also amber is still stuck with the old IDE which is quite limited and quite ugly not easy to use. Helios however is shaping up to a great IDE and even though it still has a long way to go to reach Pharo features its definetly cleaner and better in some areas.
I am not an experienced amber developer or pharo developer by any means but my opinion is that even though amber claims that it tries to be compatible with Pharo , that's is more a side feature than a main goal. Integration wise something like Seaside seems like a much nicer option and it integrates very deeply with Pharo. I see amber more like competition to Pharo than a cooperative tool, which is not a bad thing at all, I could see myself dropping Pharo for Amber if the IDE gets more powerful. Amber developers have definitely done a very good job so far, Another thing I am missing is the pharo debugger. I assume that the debugger has a lot of work , maybe years of development till it can be at the same level as pharo debugger. I also dislike the fact that amber does not produce readable javascript code. I know for many people amber as front end and pharo as back end is the way to go. But the reality is that javascript with the success of node.js has conquered back end library wise. So if amber manages to provide a very good IDE and a good debugger, it will be extremely hard to choose Pharo over Amber even for desktop apps. Afterall the days that an internet browser was just for browsing the internet are long gone for good. I know I will sound like a heretic , but I think its in the interest of Pharo community to support Amber. Html/js looks to me like an ever expanding market and I see less and less people going back to coding just for desktop. This is also the direction most languages go towards as well. I dislike many things about web development but I cannot be any less that shocked with the amount of evolution of javascript, internet browsers , html , css and the myriads of third party libraries. If not amber, then another way to allow Pharo nice , modern and clean access to web technologies. Maybe Seaside is more than enough, or maybe there better ways to integrate amber wth pharo or maybe there is a third party tool that I am not aware of. In any case I will follow this thread with great interest because the answer is important to me too. On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Torsten Bergmann <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > as I read somewhere that Amber want to stay compatible > with Pharo (at least with the core classes) I wonder > how this compatibility is measured/enforced these days. > > Are there tools to exchange code between the two? > > I also wonder if what would be necessary to run Amber on > Java Nashorn (a JS engine that comes with the JDK 8). > Could serve as a horse to also run on JVM... > > Why I'm asking: I think one of our goals should be to > make Pharo more widely usable to not end up as an island. > > If Pharo and Amber stay compatible to a certain amount > Amber could open the door for Pharo to other target platforms > (browser, mobile devices, other language runtimes) as > JS is available nearly everywhere. > > Thx > T. > > >
