Eclipse Orion 1.0: Browser IDE reaches important milestone

Following last week's EclipseCon Europe conference, the Orion developers have released version 1.0 of Eclipse Orion, the browser IDE that was first presented in early 2011. Mostly developed by IBM employees, the IDE aims at providing development tools that work in browsers without requiring installation and can communicate with a completely stateless server infrastructure. Orion focuses on JavaScript, HTML and CSS development. Another major feature is that new functions can simply be created as plug-ins hosted on the user's own site.

Among the more important areas of intended use for Eclipse Orion is the application development within cloud environments. Since late 2011, Orion has been used as part of the Firefox browser's development toolkit and served as an editor and as a basis for the content-assist features in VMware's new Scripted browser editor.

The developers now plan to produce major releases every four months; the next version could, therefore, be released as early as February 2013. The project's roadmap includes items such as improving the user interface and experience, the improved integration of extensions with existing components, better enabling hosting alternatives to the Eclipse Foundation's OrionHub service, improved JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 language support, and a revision of the interaction with the Node.js JavaScript framework. Finally, the developers say that they are interested in adding further components to complement existing ones such as Esprima, JSLint, Doctrine, RequireJS, Mozilla Persona and Mozilla GCLI.

Eclipse Orion 1.0 can be downloaded from the project's site or users can create an account on Orionhub.org and start developing with it immediately. Eclipse Orion server code is licensed under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL) and the client is dual licensed under the EPL and the Eclipse Distribution Licence (a version of the New BSD Licence).

(djwm)