Developers are being given the chance to beta test Eclipse’s Orion browser-based development tool.

The Eclipse Foundation is best known for Eclipse Framework, the workbench designed to give programmers working in Java, and other languages, a way to connect third party tools into a single framework. Orion is a browser-based development environment being developed by the same team that created the Eclipse Framework.

The Eclipse Foundation has now announced that it will let up to 5,000 developers sign up to the beta version of Orion. Orion is designed to provide a language-neutral platform rather than concentrating solely on JavaScript. Programmers can design apps using HTML5, Dojo and CSS as well as JavaScript and can work a variety of browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Harish Grama, vice president of product development at IBM Rational, commented that

“some of the players focused too much on one programming language or one paradigm”,

adding that Eclipse wants to be inclusive rather than exclusive. He said that the team wants Orion to enable building and designing artifacts for JSON and Atom among other protocols:

”You want to be able to source these artifacts from wherever they are on the Web and not just what you're able to develop locally".

The beta was released during Eclipse’s annual EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, and includes a server-side hub that can be used to register and create a workspace. Orion Hub is an Equinox OSGi server built in Java that communicates with clients using RESTful APIs. The first general release is planned for June next year.

You can sign-up for an Orion account here: http://www.eclipse.org/orion/, and the project is being hosted at OrionHub: http://www.orionhub.org/.