Eclipse Orion 9.0 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

9.0

Description

The Orion 9.0 release will be in June 2015, following the project's regular 4 month release cycle. The main areas of focus will be on JavaScript tooling, performance improvements, and cleaner developer experience.

Architectural Issues

Orion continues to deliver both Java and Node/JavaScript implementations of the back end server. The Java-based server is functionally complete and intended for multi-user configurations. The Node/JavaScript server provides basic navigation and source editing only, and is intended as a single user installation.

Orion consumers have reported that while it is easy to consume individual Orion client components source as the editor control, it is hard to consume larger sets of the Orion client technology, such as the JavaScript tooling support. We have made progress towards packaging up a more pluggable source editor that includes powerful language tooling capabilities. This is an effort that will continue, with the aim of providing a powerful and reusable source editor in the next Orion release.

Security Issues

All known major security vulnerabilities are resolved.

Non-Code Aspects

The Planet Orion blog is regularly updated with new feature announcements, and tips.

All Orion client side strings are externalized to support translation. Orion has been tested in various locales and critical translation bugs have been addressed. Server side strings are not externalized or translatable, and in some error situations these messages may appear in the client user interface, but we address these bugs as they are reported.

Usability Details

This release addresses a long standing usability complaint from users that they would like to be able to see multiple source files at once. This release introduces a split editor page that can be used to view and edit two source files at once, in various layouts. The user interface has also been refreshed with a goal of streamlining and simplifying the user interface.

End of Life

There are no end of life issues to report for this release.

Standards

The Orion team participates in W3C/WhatWG and ECMA standards and working groups (TC39). Examples of standards being developed in parallel to Orion implementations include HTML Templates, LocalFileSystem, URI Templates, and Promises.

Communities

Orion continues to grow both the committer and contributor bases.  Participation in UCOSP, Google Summer of Code and Facebook Open Academy has introduced many developers in University to Cloud Coding.  Orion is currently listed as a highly active Eclipse project and in the top 2% of all projects recorded at Open Hub. Orion committers and contributors continue to present about Orion at conferences and Eclipse Days.

This release is part of Mars