Creating code using online services is becoming increasingly mainstream but we still need better tools. Eclipse Orion is intended to be a general purpose code development system. With the target of completing Version 1.0 in time for EclipseCon Europe in October, its first milestone version, Orion 1.0 M1, has been released.

The Eclipse Foundation opened its Orion project to beta-testers eighteen months ago, reached Version 0.5 in June and is now in the final stages of reaching Version 1.0.

As clarified in a recent blog post, Eclipse Orion is an IDE for client-side web developers providing tools for developing web applications with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

Or, as an earlier post explained:

Orion is not just a sexy editor and some navigation, it has a distributed plug-in architecture, a micro-services framework and reusable components.

Orion is intended as a place to collaborate on building lightweight extensible components and framework for the browser. It offers a fully featured JavaScript+CSS+HTML development toolkit including Git support, full indexed searching, full featured navigation, self hosting site deployment and Console support and includes an editor with code completion, outline view, and error reporting. 

The current release cycle, that should culminate in Orion 1.0 within a matter of around six weeks, is on cleaning up and polishing previous releases but details of new features, including a new settings page for customizing Orion's appearance and dynamic Git page loading to speed up display of the repository list can be found here.