The Eclipse Orion project has released version 2.0 of Orion, the project to create a browser- based platform for integrating web development tools.

The idea behind Orion is to move software development to the web as a web experience, as opposed to just cloning the desktop IDE experience in a browser.

All you need is a modern web browser, from there you can write code in an editor, link to a repository, and create a site. Orion 2.0 now has a base platform for developing HTML, JavaScript and CSS applications. There is source code management through Git, built in search capabilities, an editor with JavaScript content assist, Sites and self hosting your code as you develop it, a few deployment scenarios and a growing list of plugins to extent the base functionality.

The team behind Orion says that the main improvements to this release are improved JavaScript tooling and content assist inference, so object types and properties can be inferred in more cases. There are also improved hosting scenarios on Node.js, and additional file services and discovery and deployment solutions for the projects you are developing in Orion.

There are Shell enhancements to support the standalone Node.js version of Orion, easier embedding of the Orion Editor, and the removal of library dependencies.

In a recent blog post about this, Susan McCourt says

“Recently, as a major goal of our Orion 2.0 release, we removed even more library code in order to improve our consumability and reduce our footprint. We had started out the project using dojo and dijit. But the browsers continue to add more native utilities, and we have the luxury of targeting only the most current browser implementations. It was becoming clear that
we were using a smaller and smaller subset of the library, and we'd be better off using the existing browser support and small shims or other scripts as needed.”

Given that the users are all developers restricting Orion to the latest browsers makes a lot of sense.

Orion 2.0 also contains a prototype of Projects. At the moment Projects will let you set up an SFTP project and filter down some of your folders to make it easier to work on a particular task. This is the first step in project support; future releases will provide more support for work flows and repository integrations.

The team is planning for version 3.0 to be released near the end of June. They are focusing 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. You can try out the 2.0 release at: https://orionhub.org/