The team is happy to announce our 2.0 Release of Orion, 4 months after coming out of incubation at Eclipse. There’s been several posts along the way about what we’ve been working on but a few highlights include removing library dependencies to allow easier consumption, continuous improvements to JS Content Assist, simplifying the process for embedding the Orion Editor and Shell enhancements mostly to support the stand alone Node.js version of Orion. You can download it or jump to Orionhub.org to try it out.
The Node version of Orion is a great example of how well the client side of the code is separated from the Server aspects. There are no client side specific changes, it’s all handled by the server providing compatible RESTful APIs and the plugins extending the client to enable npm and node launching capabilities. Need to edit any file wherever Node.js is running? It’s as easy as “npm install orion” (see the Doc). There’s still some work ongoing to make it easier to allow extensions to the Orion Node server without changing code and we hope to have that enabled for 3.0.
Orion 2.0 also contains a prototype of Projects. At the moment Projects will let you setup an SFTP project plus filter down some of your folders so that you can focus on a particular task. The aim is to provide much more complete support for work flows and repository integrations, and they will be added over time. To enable the Projects page, just follow the Get Plugins link in the banner and add it in.
Under the covers there were a lot of changes to the libraries we use within Orion. Simon Kaegi will be speaking about creating specifications for some of these libraries at his OSGi and JavaScript session at EclipseCon. The following list is a few of our key reusable libraries:
- Orion Deferred
- Orion HTML Templates Shim
- Orion URI Templates
- Orion URL Shim
- Orion Plugin Registry
- Orion Service Registry
- Orion XHR Implementation
- Orion Node Deferred File System
You can also now easily consume builds of just the Orion Editor for use in your projects, web pages or Blog posts. See the blog post link below or in action via a Snippet plugin
The Scripted team has also made great strides with their desktop version of the Orion Editor, you can check that out on GitHub.
We now start our planning for 3.0 to be released near the end of June. The team and contributors are still focused on Projects, improved content assist, a simple way to experiment with Orion without creating an account, web components, expanded Node capabilities and deployment options from within Orion. There are some great talks about Orion at EclipseCon in Boston and some great synergy building around other Eclipse projects and how we might work together. Join our weekly dev and bi-weekly UX calls, join the mailing list, look for ways to use or contribute to Orion. This is a great time to join in as the project is really starting to gain momentum.
Orion 2.0 M1 – New and Noteworthy
Orion 2.0 M2 – New and Noteworthy
A Journey Toward Web Components (Part 1)
Editing eclipse.org Web Sites with OrionHub
Embed the latest Orion Editor in your code in 2 steps
Orion 2.0: What’s New for Shell page plug-ins
Managing a Web Site using Orion and SFTP