[yt-dev] Fwd: [IPython-dev] Data viz in the notebook with JS

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all (including Fernando, who I forgot was subscribed when I
forwarded that message a few days ago!),

This may also be of interest here.  It's more from IPython mailing
lists about implementing widgets like what we have in Reason, using
their notebook engine.  As my work on Reason lately has been
refactoring it for client-side maintainability and to work with
ExtJS4, I haven't thought about the python-side of it lately, and this
would have to touch that a bit.

If you want to play with the most recently released IPython notebook,
it's available when yt is installed with the INST_0MQ option set to 1.
 The command "ipython notebook" will get you started.

Any enterprising devs that want to work on integration should
definitely speak up; my time is otherwise mostly occupied for the
near/mid-future, but I'd be happy to lend a hand where I can.  I'd
want this to be part of the ExtJS4 port, as I don't see any point in
having two major, independent sets of changes to Reason.

Advantages to using IPython-notebook:

 * Using websockets will reduce latency between actions and responses
by a considerable amount
 * Outsource all of the kernel launching (MPI/Queue/local), which
would probably ease the development of interactive in-browser parallel
VR
 * Outsource dealing with process handling
 * Payloads sent from yt widget code would not *necessarily* need to
be received within Reason, but could possibly be displayed in a
vanilla Notebook

Disadvantages:

 * Several additional external dependencies (zeromq, pyzeromq, jinja2,
tornado).  Three of these are currently optional dependencies in the
install script.
 * Payload system will have to be rewritten
 * Unclear amount of our REPL/Notebook code will have to be rewritten
 * The IPython notebook's storage format (SQLite) may not play nicely
with all Lustre systems
 * Possible impedance mismatch between JS libraries used in Notebook and ExtJS4
 * My understanding of how WebSockets work doesn't cover how they work
when SSH tunneling to bind to a socket, so I am putting potential
glitches from this approach under "disadvantage"

For those interested, my ExtJS4 work is in my fork at
https://bitbucket.org/MatthewTurk/yt-extjs4 .  The code is
considerably cleaned up from the first generation of Reason, and I
think more inviting for development.  As an example, compare the code
for these sets of files between the old Reason and the new:

New:
yt/gui/reason/html/app/controller/widgets/PlotWindow.js
yt/gui/reason/html/app/view/widgets/PlotWindow.js

Old:
yt/gui/reason/html/js/widget_plotwindow.js

View & handler code has been completely separated, and I believe
there's just enough magic to make developing new widgets easy and
straightforward.  I'm still porting existing widgets and bringing
basic functionality up to spec, but the architecture is complete.

-Matt

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 5:09 PM
Subject: [IPython-dev] Data viz in the notebook with JS
To: IPython Development list <ipython-dev at scipy.org>, IPython User
list <ipython-user at scipy.org>


Hi folks

Here's a quick preview of what we can start having now:

http://imgur.com/vk2Q6

courtesy of Cameron Bates:

https://github.com/crbates/ipython-flot/blob/master/IPython/frontend/html/notebook/flot.py

I suggest simply to grab the single flot.py file and put it in your
working dir for testing.

We still have a ways to go with this kind of setup, because the user
experience upon saving is a bit awkward: these javascript objects are
only rendered when their code executes, so the saved page shows empty
placeholders.  We'll have to think more about all this, but it's great
to have a concrete point to start from.

Now that all the JavaScript refactoring has been merged, writing
dynamic code with JS in the notebook will be much cleaner.

If anyone is looking for toys of this nature to play with, here's a
great summary page of viz JS libraries that could all be very
elegantly plugged into the notebook:

http://selection.datavisualization.ch

Let us know what you come up with!

Cheers,

f
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