Eclipse Orion 3.0.0 Release Review

Type
Release
State
Successful
End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Project
Release

3.0.0

Description

The Orion 3.0 Release coincides with the Eclipse Kepler release train. Orion releases a new Dot version every 4 months to keep pace with the rapid development of the libraries Orion consumes form the community and for those consuming Orion in applications or product.

Architectural Issues

Orion continues to work on the Scalability of the Server - some initial work has been done to create new meta data API that consumes the existing non-scalable backing store.  In 4.0 that work will continue.

The Project concepts started in 2.0 are also not complete and existing only as an add-on to try out, but not enabled by default.

Security Issues

There are currently no active security vunerabilities documented in Bugzilla

Non-Code Aspects

In the 3.0 Release, Orion was subject to a Global Verification Test (GVT) test pass.  Defects for DBCS, Bidi, and other language issues were entered and blocking or major defects were all addressed.  In addition, an Orion plugin to handle the externalization of Strings can be installed.  Orion, by default, only ships with English strings in the existing message catalogs.

Much work has also been done to address accessibility issues such as keyboard only use, screen readers, ARIA roles.

The Orion documentation has been found to be of great help in assisting new users to get started and to become developers of Orion plugins.

Many examples and a tutorial exist at various GitHub projects to assist in a knowledge transfer.

Usability Details

The Orion UX experience has been improved again in 3.0.  The most requested feature of Navigator on left of editor has been added and the banner/footer and layout of the breadcrumbs have been made more streamlined and clean.

The Text widget now has variable line height, word wrap and additional key bindings such as emacs.

The Orion Server is extremely easy to install and the Node.js server is available as an npm module to run or to extend by other projects.

End of Life

There are no features that are EOL

Standards

There are numerous specifications Orion participates in including:

Promises A+

HTML Templates

URI Templates

URL Spec

Proposed OSGi Specifications for Plugin Registry and Service Registry

Communities

The Orion team is active in Bugzilla, newsgroups, mailing lists, the Eclipse Forums, Twitter and Google+

BUZZ containing press and blog posts related to Orion 

GSoC 2013 Project for Git Blame within the Orion Editor

Blog posts by the Team at PlanetOrion

The Orion team participated in numerous conferences thus far in 2013 including MLOC.JS, EclipseCon US, EclipseCon France, Ottawa JS, JAXConf US, IBM Innovate. EclipseCon US saw an Orion Symposium with speakers from various companies and projects working with the Orion Components.

The Orion team is growing the number of contributors and 2013 should see new companies added to the diversity of support for Orion.

This release is part of Kepler

Release Review