Orion 4.0 Released

Another 4 month push and Orion R4.0 is available for Download, for use at OrionHub or if you’re running Node.js you can npm install orion and then npm start orion (There’s a video of installing the Node.js version of Orion on a Raspberry Pi if you like to follow along).

The Orion team has been working across the server, core code and client side UI. The most noticeable change is the removal of the Navigator Page in favour of the NOL (Nav on left) as we call it. If you land on a folder with a readme.md then this is now rendered on the right, like one would expect. Further UI work was done on an alignment of icons, selection policies, and colour themes through the various Orion pages.

The concept of a Project has been introduced as well. Currently, there is a small amount of meta-data stored in a project.json file however this will be where additional Project features will be placed. There is a separate Project view and an extensible area on the project overview do describe project relationships or capabilities.

There’s a new Getting Started link on the Persona icon to describe a few common tasks.

The underlying User model in the Java server implementation was changed to more easily support scalability. A users ‘workspace’ is now completely stand-alone to support sharing between Orion servers (Java, Node.js, others). The server config file needs to be altered to migrate to this new format.

You can see another long list of the changes in R4.0 in John Arthorne’s post Orion 4.0 M2 – New and Noteworthy

The project has picked up a lot of new contributors and a few new committers in this release. The Orion Client is easy to clone and start working on since it’s just self hosted development. We hope you can help us fix some of the bugs entered or add features you think are missing from an online IDE.

Onto another 4 month release cycle for R5.0!