Some tips from Fernando

[rjleveque]

Some notes from discussion with @fperez yesterday...

1. We should take a look at https://github.com/takluyver/bookbook regarding cross referencing between notebooks.

2. Regarding "Save notebook with widgets" doesn't seem to work jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets#1085, this seems to be fixed in the latest master branch... But: it only shows the widgets and lets you move them, it doesn't embed the results in the notebook like the old StaticWidgets, so you won't see the plots change. So not really what we want.

3. If we use widgets and want the pdf version to show the plots with a specific setting, we could initialize them using value = in creating the widgets. For more control, e.g. to set different values for the pdf than what we want to initialize them to in the notebook, we could add info to the cell metadata and then modify nbconvert to parse this.

4. Several examples of notebooks in journal publications can be found at:

   • https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/A-gallery-of-interesting-Jupyter-Notebooks#reproducible-academic-publications
   • http://www.nature.com/news/ipython-interactive-demo-7.21492

5. Perhaps not relevant for this book project, but some interesting new projects for rendering and manipulating 3d plots in a notebook:

   • https://github.com/jovyan/pythreejs
   • https://github.com/maartenbreddels/ipyvolume
     And it's possible to manipulate with a game controller:
   • https://github.com/ipython/ipywidgets/blob/master/docs/source/examples/Controller.ipynb

[fperez]

Let me know how things progress, and we can definitely help out!

/cc @michaelpacer

[SylvainCorlay]

@rjleveque

• A few things that we are looking at for more flexibility in absence of a python back end:

  • A simple data store widget mean for storing some results.
  • A more flexible jslink widget, with some ability to transform data in the front end. There are some security considerations for this item, but we have made some experiments already.

• Also, we have examples of creating web apps with widgets that actually spawn a kernel for the back end computation. We have not streamlined this yet but PRs are open with mybinder to be able to use it as a kernel provider service.