The Eclipse Foundation today announced the immediate availability of OrionHub, an open beta and hosted version of Orion. Orion is a new direction for Eclipse, with the intent to deliver code based editing and debugging through a web-based interface (similar to previous versions such as Bespin/Skywriter) with the build-and-compile on the back end server.
To support developers experimenting with Eclipse Orion, a beta hosted environment is available for the first 5000 developers who sign up, although if demand exceeds this they may be scaled up in the future.
However, Orion is also available as a separate download, enabling developers to host their own Orion servers on their local machines or servers. The Orion web-based client runs in FireFox 3.6+, Microsoft IE 8 and 9, and Safari 5.0+
The Orion editor also has its own (client-side) plug-in architecture system, enabling tools like JSLint and JSBeautify to run in the local browser instead of going back to the server. There is Git support which enables developers to maintain a view of their local development history and to facilitate merging/pushing back to the client.
For more information, go to the Orion homepage which has a built-in demo editor to show how files are rendered and edited. There's a separate news feed and a Planet Orion blog aggregator, as well as a twitter account @orion_oti. The source code is available for forking on GitHub for both the Orion Client Orion Server.