Enhancements in Orion 5 include: syntax highlighting for several languages, content assist for several Node.js libraries and databases, better syntax validation, cloud deployment and others.
The Eclipse Orion team has incrementally improved their web-based embeddable editor since last time when we covered it on InfoQ a year ago. Although it has incipient support for editing various languages, Orion is meant to be firstly an online editor for web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript, providing syntax highlighting, validation and content assist and outline.
Orion 5 has a new look and feel, exchanging the Action and Navigation buttons with a new left-hand Navigation bar, traditional menus and context menus, the latter containing the most frequent commands. The content assisting functionality, which is a must-have feature for most developers, has been made faster, a bit more easier to use and it is using a different style compared to previous versions.
Syntax validation for JavaScript in Orion 5 is done via ESLint with the exception of the HTML <script> tag. The team has switched from JSLint to ESLint due to its configurability, which in turn allows the end user to decide how the editor marks validation issues – Ignore, Warning, Error. The editor now does syntax validation for JSON files.
Orion 5 has also introduced a new syntax highlighting mechanism, adding support for a number of languages beside the traditional web ones: JSON, XML, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and YAML. Support for other languages can be included through the plug-in mechanism used.
Orion 5 includes content assist for several Node.js libraries, for several databases - Redis, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB –, for the AMQP library, and Express.js framework. Other libraries can be indexed using Orion’s plug-in mechanism.
An interesting addition to Orion 5 is the ability to deploy a project on a PaaS using the Cloud Foundry API.
Orion 4, released in November last year, introduced a number of smaller enhancements, including: the Project concept, support for Markdown documents, bracket completion, smart indent, customized editor rulers, support for IE8, and others.
Eclipse Orion can also be installed locally, being based on Node.js and connect, an HTTP server framework for Node.js. This local version provides support for file editing, basic file management, extension via plug-ins, client caching for static content, a shell, and gzip compression.