The Eclipse Orion project team has released version 12 of the IDE, bringing full support for the ECMAScript 2015 Language Specification.
Started by the IBM Eclipse team to investigate moving application development to the cloud, Orion aims to create a browser-based open tool integration platform focused on developing for the web, in the web. Orion's tools are written in JavaScript, and run in the browser.
Olivier Thormann, software developer at IBM and Orion committer, says of the ECMAScript 2015 support:
Orion 12.0 supports all of the ECMA 2015 specification like arrow functions, import/export statements and classes.
The tooling completely understands the new language syntax with new quick fixes and code templates also being available to get you started. The linting rules have also been updated to respect the new ECMA 2015 code patterns.
In the post Announcing Orion 12 Mike Rennie, Orion contributor, said the release continues to emphasise Orion's JavaScript tooling, and that along with support for ECMAScript 2015, the release includes improved project configuration capabilities, and support for eslintrc.* files.
Also significant among the Orion 12 updates is the Code Edit Widget. Committer Libing Wang says the widget now comes with both customisable editor configurations and options to fine tune your .tern-project and .eslintrc files, along with other major improvements including the ability to import multiple files into the widget. The widget's updated wiki page includes a demo showing how .tern-project and .eslintrc files are used to configure the JavaScript validation in the widget.
Orion's latest release also fixes over 350 bugs and enhancements, as well as updating and refreshing its third party libraries. Orion has discontinued use of the Esprima parser in version 12, in favour of Acorn. Thormann says there are "many reasons" for the switch, but most significantly:
- Acorn has complete ECMA 2015 support (with recovery for most of it).
- We can easily extend the Acorn parser via its plugin mechanism, so there is no need to edit parser code to have our Orion customisations.
- Acorn has robust recovery support right out of the box (no more editing the parser to hack our own in).
InfoQ readers interesred to contribute to the project should look at the Orion Wiki page and introduce themselves on the mailing list. Readers can also download Orion (Java or Node version) and/or login to OrionHub.org and make an account. The Orion team welcomes feedback on the project.
