Eclipse Orion 7.0

Release Date
Deliverables

The main deliverables for the Orion 7.0 release are a multi-user server based on a Java runtime and a single-user server based on a Node.js runtime.

With each of these two runtimes, the client code representing the features of Orion will be served to a supported browser and allow additional functionality to be installed client side through a plug-in framework.

Primary support is for scripting languages however any file type can be edited.

The multi-user Java Server provides enhancements not found in the Node.js server including Git support, long running tasks, authentication, and an indexed search service.

Compatibility

Orion aims to provide compatibility for plugins. Plugins written for previous versions of Orion, that only use well documented services, will continue to work in Java 7.0.

Documented server REST API has only changed in compatible ways. Existing client code running against previous versions of the Orion server (either Java or Node) will continue to work in Orion 7.0.

No compatibility is provided within Orion server code, on either Java or Node servers.

Internationalization

Continue to provide translatable language packs and a framework for utilizing them within Orion and for any plugins

Target Environments

Java7 Based runtime for the Orion Server

Node.js (> v0.10.21) Based runtime for the Orion Node Server

Client Side Browser Support

  • Chrome/Chromium 30+
  • Firefox 37+
  • IE 10+
  • Safari 7+
Themes

Server scalability

Ensure the Orion Java server scales up to a large number of multiple concurrent users. Support clustering of multiple instances of the server behind a load balancer. Separate instance-local from shared persisted state on disk to ensure multiple servers only share the data and metadata that is required for consistency.

New Git user interface

Rewrite the Orion Git UI, with a focus on simplifying user workflows, and improving consumability of Git UI in other applications. The new UI will aim to drastically reduce the number of different Git pages, increase responsiveness, simplify the most common user workflows, and make better use of space on the page.

New help system

The existing Orion help system is inherited from the Eclipse Platform UA component. It has a very dated look (circa 2004), and pulls in significant requirements on the server implementation (notably JSP support). We will rewrite the help system from scratch to provide a clean, modern user interface. Documentation will be authorized in Markdown and rendered into HTML at runtime to simplify documentation authoring and avoid built-time complexity.

JavaScript tooling enhancements

We will enhance the JavaScript tooling with better support for using type indexes to drive content assist. We will also add hover help to show documentation for the selected item while editing JavaScript. We will move up to newer versions of Esprima and eslint, and exploit related new linting capabilities.