The Eclipse Orion team has released the latest version of its web-based IDE. Orion 4.0 has improvements to the client side UI, the server and the core code.

The release comes four months after the previous release in June as part of the annual Eclipse ‘release train’ and, according to a  recent post on Orion News by John Athorne, the team has been working on enhancements including JavaScript tools and “some major long term efforts we’re not quite ready to blog about yet”.  

The most obvious change to the UI is the removal of the Navigator Page, which has been replaced by a layout with Navigation on the left. Other changes to the UI are better alignment of icons, selection policies, and colour themes.

The JavaScript editor has been improved with support for smart indentation, and for block comment autocomplete. If you press return after an opening brace character, the following line will be indented by one additional tab. The Block comment completion means that if you press return on a line containing only /* or /**, the editor will insert the closing comment characters, and automatically begin each line within the block comment with a * character.

Bracket completion has also been added, and the Orion editor will now automatically close braces, brackets, and single and double quotes. When you type an opening brace, bracket or quote, the closing character will be inserted automatically and the cursor placed between the matching pair. If you select some text and type an open bracket or quote, the entire selection will be enclosed in a matching pair.

New in this release is the addition of a Project as a concept. This is obviously a work in progress, as the current incarnation stores only a small amount of metadata in a project.json file. On Orion news, Ken Walker says that this will be where additional Project features will be placed.

Another change is to the underlying User model in the Java server implementation. In order to more easily support scalability, users workspaces are now completely standalone to support sharing between Orion servers such as Java and Node.js.

You can download Orion 4.0 from Eclipse and you can also use it at the OrionHub.

This video shows installing the Node.js version of Orion on a Raspberry Pi