Orion 3.0 Released

This week the Orion project released version 3.0 as part of the Eclipse Kepler simultaneous release. Check it out now on OrionHub, or download your own copy of the server. The server is available in WAR format for the first time, and a pure JavaScript server implementation is also available via npm.

The tone for this release was set at EclipseCon 2013 in Boston, where it became clear that Orion was entering a new phase of adoption. Developers from HP, VMWare (Pivotal), IBM, and others came forward at the conference with demos and prototypes of Orion-based development tools. See Ken Walker’s recent JAXConf slides for screenshots and examples of the kinds of applications being built with Orion.

The following three months have been a rapid growing up period, where commercial concerns such as scalability, security, accessibility, translation, performance, and usability have been the project’s focus. The Orion 3.0 release is emerging from that maelstrom with a more polished and hardened set of components for building browser-based development tools. For more details, here are some recent posts that dive into the features coming with the latest release:

• Orion 3.0 M1 – New and Noteworthy
• Orion 3.0 M2 – New and Noteworthy
• Ian Bull’s Orion 3.0 review
• Ken Walker’s Eclipse newsletter article

With the 3.0 release out the door, planning is well underway for the 4.0 release scheduled for October 2013. For the next release we hope to return to a more balanced development with great new developer tools as well as continuing to harden the core Orion infrastructure.