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Pharo IDE in Amber?

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Siemen Baader

Pharo IDE in Amber?

Hi All,

I am cross posting this to the Amber and Pharo-dev lists as the both seem equally relevant, I hope that's ok.

I’d like to discuss what the options would be to offer Pharo’s great IDE support in Amber. Helios and the classic IDE are great and a huge leap forward for in-browser live development, but Pharo is evolving rapidly. Also, having a full window system allows other workflows like inspecting classes and mocking something up in the Playground at the same time.

Is there a way to make Amber and the Pharo developer tools be source code compatible, so that we could simply have the IDE open in a pop-up (like Helos), but have the Pharo desktop there?

It would be very nice if this could be a once-and-for-all integration so that Amber would just use the current Pharo’s Desktop.

I realize that there must be some challenges in that Amber does not have the same data types available (ie no Integer class, only Number, fewer collection types), but perhaps they can be introduced in Amber. There must be issues with concurrency models & callbacks that work differently in Pharo and the browser as well.

If this can be overcome, I think the options would be to either:

a) implement a Morphic raster rendering backend based on HTML5 Canvas, or:

2) create DOM & CSS based Morphic widgets, like the Lively Kernel does.

What do you think?

best,

Siemen

Pierce Ng-3

Re: Pharo IDE in Amber?

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 02:58:21PM +0200, Siemen Baader wrote:
> If this can be overcome, I think the options would be to either:
> a) implement a Morphic raster rendering backend based on HTML5 Canvas, or:
> 2) create DOM & CSS based Morphic widgets, like the Lively Kernel does.

iii) Take a look at the Shampoo protocol: https://github.com/dmatveev/shampoo.
With a Shampoo client in Pharo and a Shampoo server in Amber, you can use Pharo
as your Amber IDE. Of course initially this is just using the Pharo IDE as an
editor for programming Amber and doesn't offer much integration, but once the
connectivity is there, I'm sure other possibilities open up.

Btw, I cooked up what I called MorphIDE in 2011 when Amber was Jtalk. But
eventually I didn't use Jtalk for anything so MorphIDE didn't grow beyond the
proof of concept. See http://www.samadhiweb.com/blog/2011.09.03.morphide.html.

Also, the Jtalk/Amber examples on my blog may not work because the JS files
were lost when I moved the blog across machines.

Pierce