This post is inspired by this IBM DeveloperWorks article on Eclipse Orion.
” Develop your software where ever you go. It’ll be there, in the cloud, right where you left it. Just login from a web browser on desktop, laptop, tablet, at an airport, on a bus or even in your office.” Thats what the Orion Website says! And I say its just amazing! The futuristic development tool is here, now!
Orion has already powered JazzHub, a place where you can collaborate with others to seamlessly plan, track, and develop software in the cloud.
Lets learn some more about Orion. Orion’s objective is to create a browser-based open tool integration platform which is entirely focused on developing for the web, in the web. Tools are written in JavaScript and run in the browser. The technologies which run behind Orion are RESTful HTTP, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, JSON, Atom, OpenID, OAuth, Persona, etc. It uses pure HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript on the client, and Java with Equinox, Jetty, and JGit on the server. The key tasks done through Orion are coding, navigating, searching and interacting with SCM. Key fundamental is performance over power; that means the pages load at a very fast pace than giving too many options or integrations but balance the features needed intuitively. You can try out the editor here -> https://orion.eclipse.org/examples/editor/demo.html
Code editor supports the basics (cut/copy/paste, undo/redo) and Eclipse desktop features (move up/down, copy up/down, go to line, find, incremental find). Most of these commands are accessible only through keyboard shortcuts, using the default key bindings in Eclipse desktop. To see a full list of available keyboard commands in the editor, press Alt+Shift+? (Ctrl+Shift+? on Mac OS). Outside of the editor, you can get the same help on any page by pressing Shift+?. The editing page shows a small tree of your files in the left-hand pane. Like its larger counterpart on the Navigator page, the miniature file tree lets you perform file management actions: create files and folders, rename, delete, etc. You can even drag & drop from files from your local computer into the file tree to upload them. The editor will syntax highlight your code when working with JavaScript (a *.js file). Orion provides an outline of your JS functions: click the View Options (View options) menu to switch between the file tree and the outline. Editor implements a plug-in that runs JSLint on JavaScript files in order to produce the outline and problem markers. JSLint is JavaScript Code Quality Tool. The editor will also match brackets when you click next to a bracket, perform auto indention, and provide source-code oriented key bindings for things like toggling comments and adding/removing block comments. Syntax highlighting of CSS files is also supported. Orion uses CSSLint to validate and check for problems in CSS files. A simple HTML outline is provided, based on DOM ids. Syntax highlighting is also available for HTML files. Java syntax highlighting is also supported. Pluggable editor actions have been implemented, which allow third-party developers to extend the behavior of the Orion editor on the fly.
The Eclipse Orion Getting started guide has all the details on the editor, searching, navigation and working with SCM.
With the new Orion 4.0 M2, support has been added for Embedded markdown renderer, Bracket completion, Smart indent, Block comment completion, Option to show whitespace characters, Trim trailing whitespace on save, Customized editor rulers, Customize local editor settings dropdown, Toggle regular expression search in search bar, Search support for replacing with whitespace characters, Content assist more tolerant of syntax errors, Navigate content assist with page up/down, Auto-save now transfers only file deltas. The Orion editor now tolerates running on Internet Explorer 8 and JSLint can be turned off. Support has been added to enable in-editor Git blame on a file by adding Git Blame plugin. Git revert command added and the Orion Git integration has been upgraded to use a new major version of JGit, version 3.0.
The plan for the Orion 5.0 Release is to be in February, 2014 and coincide with EclipseCon North America. The 5.0 plan will have 4 main focus areas including “Features”, “Infrastructure”, “Core” and “Community”. Some of the ideas within the 5.0 Project Plan would ideally involve some community efforts to implement and those will be called out.
Try it out @ Orion Hub!
Maya Shenoi's Tech Notes 