Pharo IDE in Amber?

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Pharo IDE in Amber?

Siemen Baader
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