Poll: Should we rename Amber.js?

Yesterday, we announced that we were officially releasing what we had been calling SproutCore 2.0 as "Amber.js".

We did this because we had been using the name Amber as a public codename for over a year (see http://bit.ly/amber-announced), and had used it publicly for a while this year (see an update at http://bit.ly/amber-update and again when we announced TemplateView at http://bit.ly/amber-templateview).

Around the same time (March 2011), we also purchased the domain amberjs.com in anticipation of a rename later this year. During the summer, we internally came to the conclusion that we were going to stick with SproutCore 2.0 as the official name once we released, mostly leaving behind the name Amber as a codename for the project.

In September, JTalk, a Smalltalk implementation written in JavaScript, decided to rename and use the name Amber for their project. As we are not Smalltalk enthusiasts, we did not notice this change (even though it was featured on Hacker News, which we frequent[1]).

Last month, we realized that our goals had diverged sufficiently from the original SproutCore that the similarity of the names was causing mass confusion. We decided to go ahead with the original plan to rename "SproutCore 2.0" to "Amber". It was made especially problematic when a number of existing SproutCore users wanted to continue developing the SproutCore 1.x branch, which only caused additional confusion.

Because we had been casually using the name Amber in public for so long, we didn't do the thorough research we would normally have done while naming a project. Once we launched, a number of people brought Amber Smalltalk to our attention, and we frankly feel sheepish about the whole thing.

We are still planning on launching the website and docs this weekend, so we'd like to make a decision and get this behind us as soon as we can.

So what should we do?

If you think we should rename, we would love some suggestions. Please post your ideas in the comments.

[1] It's possible we missed it because Tom decided to try and improve his "productivity" by messing with his /etc/hosts file to ban Hacker News. It didn't last long.

Ah, no biggie. Go Ahead and run with Amber.js, launch your site and updates your namespaces. I doubt they'll be any toe-trampling confusion. At most there'd be one or two feathers ruffled, but we're all intelligent adults, and its totally cool to share the name. Sharing /is/ caring after all.

If you were to pick a different name to avoid overlap with Amber Smalltalk, I'd recommend substrate.js. It conveys a fundamental organizing principle in the same way "backbone" does, and best of all it starts with 's' so all the SCs all over the place will still halfway make sense.

I just searched for "Amber" on Google, and the first 5 (!) pages didn't show me anything even remotely Smalltalk-related. I didn't looked any further. Stick with Amber.js.

Depends... is Amber still affiliated with Sproutcore at all? If so, something like Sproutcore Slim would be cool

Of course, all the good names are taken: http://slim-lang.com/