I just released Orchid 0.9.0, a major update of the brand-new JAMstack framework for Java and Kotlin! This update adds many new features, like new Accordion and Tag tags, and greatly improves many existing features, like Github Pages deployment.
If you haven't heard of Orchid yet, I'd encourage you to follow along with my tutorial series here on Dev.to, where I walk you through the process of building your own beautiful and unique website using Orchid.
Here are some more helpful links to get you started working with Orchid.
Top comments (4)
Looks like a cool project! I did notice in your readme.md your example image (orchid.netlify.com/OrchidCore/asse...) seems to be returning a HTML response which breaks in Github.
Thanks for pointing that out, I just fixed it.
Cool stuff. What's the motivation behind the name, Orchid?
The short version
It's fairly arbitrary, overall. When I started working on Orchid, I needed a name. I looked around my apartment and saw an orchid sitting on the counter, and thought that it sounded like a perfect name. Short, sounds cool, and orchids are a type of flower that are beautiful and unique, and idea that matches the kinds of websites Orchid makes.
The longer version
I first started working on Orchid around Christmas 2016, and needed a name to use for namespaces, package names, etc. I knew I wanted the package name to include "Eden", invoking imagery from the Garden of Eden in the Bible. The Garden of Eden is a place of perfect beauty and harmony, and that's the kind of software I wanted this project to be. Beautiful code, beautiful websites, lots of disparate pieces working together in harmony.
So I started looking for project names that related to Garden of Eden, names of trees or plants, things like that. Well my wife is a teacher, and one of her students gave her an orchid on the last day of classes, and when I saw that sitting on the counter I thought it was perfect.
Orchids are well-known for their beauty, and they're unique; you don't see people buying bouquets of orchids, you see them buy a single one, put it in a fancy pot, and display it prominently in their home. Likewise, I had a vision of Orchid being the tool that makes static sites that are both beautiful (in code and in design) and also unique and prominent.
While similar tools tend to work with a formula and can't move much beyond that formula (most are just blogs and little more), Orchid is a framework that is easy enough to work with that you can branch out and make your site tailored perfectly to your needs. Plugins have a beautiful API so that you can just get in there and start bringing your ideas to life. Themes are flexible and are easy to set up and customize, and are also easy to create your own. And Orchid has a component-based architecture and theming system which allows you to radically change the kind of content that shows up on a page with very little effort and no knowledge of HTML or code required.
In all, no two orchids are the same, and so no two Orchid sites should be the same.