Anywidget

[justinlaughlin]

Context

• Jupyter has made a lot of breaking changes recently (1, 2) which seems to have broken our plugin:
  • Binder notebooks aren't working
  • Plugin doesn't work on a fresh install
  • I think if dependencies are set to certain versions the plugin can work (I'm not certain but I think that is why the Colab notebooks still work?); I haven't been able to replicate
• We have been using the javascript widget cookiecutter template. I tried transferring over to the latest recommended templates (Copier typescript template) but could not get it to work.
• From this cookiecutter I found out about anywidget which seems to abstract away most of the widget complexity.
• This branch is a rewrite of our widget using anywidget and can be defined using only 1) the emscripten compiled glvis hosted on npm, 2) a single javascript file, and 3) a single python file.
• We won't need the glvis-jupyter npm repo.
• In my opinion, anywidget will be a much cleaner implementation than any of the alternatives available at the moment
• There are large visualization packages that also use anywidget (e.g. pyobsplot)
• (This is true for all widgets now, I believe) The widget is pip installed like any other normal python package, and doesn't require steps from before such as jupyter nbextension enable.
• The work in this branch is related to Issue 43

Notebooks

I haven't tested much beyond our example notebooks, but they seem to all be working (also, I have not been able to run the widget except through Colab otherwise). I updated the Binder badges on this branch and they seem to work, feel free to test it out. Once this is pushed to pypi it will affect the Colab notebooks so I'm holding off on that for now.

[justinlaughlin]

This changes/deletes a lot of things so I'm converting to draft for now until there is some feedback

[tzanio]

@justinlaughlin do you understand why we get this conflicts and how to resolve them?

[justinlaughlin]

@justinlaughlin do you understand why we get this conflicts and how to resolve them?

It looks like package-lock.json got updated in main while this PR deletes package-lock.json. A lot of files including this one are deleted because they are no longer necessary thanks to anywidget. glvis/widget.js (which pulls from the npm mirror of glvis-js) contains all of the necessary javascript. There is a diagram in this branch's README that might be helpful.

I submitted another commit which just deletes package-lock.json

[tzanio]

Thanks for updating this @justinlaughlin !

[justinlaughlin]

Regarding 6ba5116, it turns out you can simply point to github instead of npm using esm. From what I tested it seems to work. This simplifies things a lot as we no longer need to host the npm mirror of glvis-js 😄.