The latest version of Orion has been released with improved JavaScript language tooling features.

Orion is Eclipse’s web development tool, where all the elements are online. You work in your web browser where you have access to a sophisticated code editor, can link to a repository and create a site. The focus on JavaScript tooling in the new release starts with the restructuring of the plug-in back-end so it loads faster, while the front end client has improved capabilities in tool-tips, context menus, split editors and commands.

The new release also includes a new widget called ‘Code Edit’ that you can use to embed the Orion editor into your web pages with all the features that the Orion editor offers.

Once downloaded, you can host the unzipped files into your web server and start to consume it in your web page. In addition to JavaScript, the widget supports other languages such as css, html and most of the web languages. Future plans are to let you inject your own plugins to the widget, letting you add new language syntax highlighting, add more editor commands, or add your own file systems for multiple file reference on language tooling.

The biggest single change in this version of Orion overall is the addition of a Tern server for code analysis. This replaces the old content assist and hover information that was powered by Orion. Tern is a code analysis tool running on the existing Esprima based parser. According to the announcement of the new version on the Orion News site:

"As soon as you start editing code we are feeding Tern information about what you are working on. Beyond the file you are editing we follow dependencies and add their information to Tern as well. This includes Node libraries linked through require() calls, AMD modules linked via define() calls and embedded scripts in HTML files. Further to that, Orion includes Tern readable indexes containing type information for common libraries including ECMAScript, Node.js, Redis, MySQL and others.

Tern performs code analysis on all of the scripts available and returns highly accurate and context specific content assist proposals (Ctrl+Space to activate). We have a large library of code templates as well to help you code faster.”

Tern also returns in-depth descriptions for the types and functions you use, and this information is delivered in the form of tool-tips to help you understand the arguments in your API calls.

Other improvements to the new version include new versions of Orion’s third party libraries (ESLint 0.15.1, ESTraverse 1.9.0, Esprima 2.0). New validation rules have been added, including no-shadow-global, no-proto, no-undef-init, no-with and missing-nls.

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