A few hours with Orion

Since I am currently working on the Javascript/HTML/CSS prototype for the EclipseCon Modeling tutorial during which we will see how to use a model driven approach to build web applications, I have decided to try Orion.

For those who don’t know Orion, it is one of the latest projects of the Eclipse foundation and it can be sum up as a web based development environment. Right know, the Orion team is focused on building a development environment for web developers which is logical since they want to use Orion to build Orion. So I tried Orion 0.4 M2 during a few hours to work on this Javascript project.

Orion was surprisingly easy to install and to start, with a file to unzip and an “.exe” file to double click on. Once launched, you can clone a git repository and start working very quickly. In Orion, a “regular Eclipse workbench” is represented by several pages that you can open in different tabs and while you can find most of the features needed to work, you can’t view at the same time the navigator and the editor so I had to spend most of my time switching from one tab to another. I believe it is currently the main problem with approach used in Orion.

As for editing part, the Javascript editor provided by Orion detects more problems than the editor in Eclipse and even if there are some false positive due to the complexity of some frameworks available in Javascript, I was impressed by the overall quality of the editor. Combined with the awesomeness of the developer tools of Chrome, it was a great coding experience. Being able to host the web application that you are working on directly on Orion is the cherry on the cake. Few clicks here and there and it’s running.

I had some issues with the stability of Orion with 4 crashes in 4 hours and with Chrome, once Orion crashes, all the tabs using Orion crash at the same time. Each time, I just had to do a simple F5 on each tab to reload them and I was ready to work and every single time without loosing anything. So even with those crashes, it is a very reliable tool. This was also possible by having this separation of each tool in its on tab. While this approach makes me spend a lot of time switching tabs, it also has some neat advantages. Since Orion has an URL for pretty much anything, I could get my editor back by opening a tab on its URL (something like this: “http://localhost:8080/edit/edit.html#/file/e/path_to_my_file”).

The git tooling is good, it allows me to work with my existing repository very quickly even if the user interface was a bit disturbing, everything needed was there so I think it’s just a matter of time to get use to it. I had a minor issue with it as it did not seem to find my ssh key contrary to the good ol’ git command line tool. It must have something to do with the fact that my ssh key is not in the default folder for ssh keys. So once in a while, I had to do a “git push origin master” from the terminal.

Edit: copying the ssh key directly in the dialog with the password works.

To conclude, I would say that working with Orion was a very good experience (especially for a 0.4 M2 version) and to work with Javascript/HTML/CSS most of the tools that are missing in Orion (ex: debugger) can be found in the developer tools of Chrome (or Firefox). There are still lot of things that can be improved like the outline which is not very useful right now and the profile management which is also quite weak but for the editing part it’s a really good experience minus an interface which feels a bit raw.