Projects plugin debuts in new Eclipse Orion 2.0

The developers of Eclipse Orion have announced that version 2.0 of the web-technology-based editor and development platform has been released. Eclipse Orion 2.0 focused on making the editor technology easier to consume by other projects; library dependencies have been removed, the process for embedding the Orion editor has been simplified, and the Orion Shell has been enhanced.

The new Orion 2.0 release has, as a plugin, a prototype of Projects, which currently allows the creation of SFTP projects on remote sites. The eventual aim is to expand Projects to support multiple repositories and workflows.

The Orion Shell enhancements are, in part, to support the Node.js version of Orion, which can now be installed with just npm install orion and run with npm start orion. Eclipse Orion is also the basis for Scripted, a desktop version of the editor that has been developed at SpringSource.

Enhancements to Orion 2.0's Shell have also added the ability to pass blobs and files to commands, so that, for example, a zip and unzip command which recursively traverses files can be relatively simply implemented. For developers interested in the two-step process to embed Orion's editor in their applications, details are given in a blog post.

The next major release, Orion 3.0, will come at the end of June. It will feature improved Projects, expanded Node support, better content assist, and the ability to deploy from within Orion. The developers also hope to come up with a way for coders to experiment with Orionhub.org, the online version of Orion, without creating an account on the system.

Orion 2.0 is available to download; downloads are provided under the Eclipse Foundation Software User Agreement and the Eclipse Public Licence.

(djwm)