The Orion Project is pleased to announce the release of Orion 8.0. You can check out the new release now on OrionHub, or grab your own copy of the Orion server from the download page. The Orion Node.js implementation matching this release is orion 0.0.35 on NPM. The Orion 8.0 release includes over 1000 commits from 36 unique contributors, and fixing 280 bugs. The major themes for this release were building higher value tools for JavaScript/CSS/HTML development, and in making the Orion server highly scalable.
In language tools, Orion 8.0 introduces Quick Fixes for automatically resolving common coding problems, semantic file to file navigation, smart language tool hovers, and many more smaller enhancements. For complete details on the extensive web tooling improvements, read Orion 8.0 Language Tooling Enhancements Part 1 and Part 2
On the server side, the main focus for Orion 8.0 has been on clustering support. For a site with heavy traffic, it is useful to have multiple Orion instances operating on the same Orion workspace content. This also allows you to have a running standby instance for fail-over and upgrade without any site downtime. To support this, Orion 8.0 has introduced file-based locking to manage contention across multiple instances. In addition, persistent state has been divided between instance-private and shared locations, to prevent sharing of the server’s own internal state that is not designed for sharing across instances.
A final major change on the server side was completely rewriting our search infrastructure. The new Orion search implementation provides global search and replace based on a server side search crawler, rather than indexing. This means searches take a little longer, but they have perfect accuracy. Server side search now also supports regular expressions and case-sensitive search, making this kind of search much faster than before. This implementation also simplifies Orion server management for large-scale Orion installs, because it saves Orion server admins from having to deal with search index sharding and Solr clustering. This server side global search is currently only available on the Java implementation of the Orion server, but there is a team in the community working on a Node.js implementation for this as well.
Enjoy!