March 21, 2011, 5:59 PM — The Eclipse Foundation is offering on Monday beta access to a hosted version of the organization's planned Orion platform for building and integrating Web development tools.
The OrionHub service will let developers experiment with Orion and provide feedback. An early release of Orion features an editor for JavaScript, HTML, and CSS that runs in browsers and can link to popular Web-based tools, Eclipse said. Orion is intended to move software development to the Web, in recognition of more and more applications going to the Web and cloud infrastructure.
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"[Orion] is still very early-days, but I expect Orion will be as important for Web developers as the initial Eclipse Java IDE was for Java developers," said Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich, in a statement released by Eclipse. "Right now we are looking for people who are interested in using or adopting Orion and who are interested in participating in the community."
The Orion hosted service is open to the first 5,000 developers signing up at the Eclipse website. Additional slots may be added at some point. Developers also can install the Orion server on their own computers.
In addition to an editor, Orion features a client-side plug-in architecture using HTML5 and enabling tools written in JavaScript to integrate with the Orion client. Orion is supported in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and 4.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and 9, and Safari 5, and it is integrated with the git version control system, providing local history for Orion projects.
Also on Monday, Juniper Networks announced its participation in Eclipse. "In joining the Eclipse Foundation, Juniper Networks can provide its customers and partners with a richer development environment for creating applications to optimize their network assets and create new revenue opportunities while reducing cost, complexity, and time," said Mike Harding, vice president of the Junos Space Business Unit at Juniper, in a statement released by the company.
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