UK Smalltalk User Group meeting - Wednesday February 24th

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 [1], created by Nicolas Petton, is a Smalltalk implemented in JavaScript running in a web browser. Silk [2], 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 [3] 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 [4] 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 [5] 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 [6], the most significant one is Values [7].

[1] https://amber-lang.net/

[2] https://smalltalkrenaissance.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/silk-is-just-too-flexible/

[3] https://unsere-gelder.de/ (in German)

[4] https://covidcrt.uber.space/ (sources at https://github.com/ChristianHaider/CoViD19UI)

[5] https://christianhaider.de/ (in German)

[6] https://wiki.pdftalk.de/doku.php

[7] https://wiki.pdftalk.de/doku.php?id=complexvalues