blazerw / docs

Documentation for Amber Framework

Introduction

Amber is a web development framework written in the Crystal language which implements the server-side MVC pattern using the object-oriented paradigm. Many of its components and concepts will seem familiar to those of us with experience in other web frameworks like Phoenix, Ruby on Rails or Python's Django.

Amber aims to deliver developer happiness, productivity, and bare metal performance. The Crystal language is heavily inspired on Ruby delivering familiarity and productivity making it easy to read and write code with a lower learning curve for experienced Ruby developers.

Crystal also has some modern features like macros, concurrency model, union types, c bindings, built in dependency manager. Amber takes advantage of all these features providing you a familiar structure to develop a web application.

Amber offers a familiar set of tools for fast prototyping and developing enterprise-grade web applications, like Generators, Database management, CLI, Deployment tools, Docker support, Encrypted secrets, WebSockets, and more. If you come from the rails world, you will feel right at home but be aware, Amber is not Rails; it's type-safe, compiled, and embraces the best features from many different frameworks so you might notice pipes for routing which is more similar to Phoenix framework.

The aim of this introductory guide is to present a brief, high-level overview of Amber Framework, the parts that make it up, and the layers underneath that support it.

Getting Help

If you’re stuck, there are a number of places you can get help.

• Gitter for quick questions.
• Stack Overflow for questions about the Crystal Language and Amber Framework.
• Github for getting acquainted with source code, current issues and progress.
• Online Guides for getting down and dirty working with Amber.
• Twitter to see latest news and announcements about Amber Framework.

Contributing

Contributing to Amber can be a rewarding way to learn, teach, and build experience in just about any skill you can imagine. You don’t have to become a lifelong contributor to enjoy participating in Amber.

Amber is a community effort and we want You to be part of ours Join Amber Community!

First Steps

Learning a new framework can be intimidating and exciting at the same time. To help you along, we have created a cookbook packed with examples and recipes to get the common tasks completed.

If you are new, you should start off with the guides.

If you want a step by step tutorial try the quick start.