🪐 ⚛️ About Jupyter UI
Jupyter UI is a set of React.js components that allow a frontend developer to build data products compatible with the Jupyter ecosystem. The user interface delivers executable notebooks, cells, terminals, file browsers and allows the developer to manage a full integrated React tree instead of relying on iframes to display the Jupyter noteboks.
The Jupyter(Lab) Notebook is a tool that allows data scientist to analyse dataset. However, it is not easy to create a custom user interface integrated in an existing application. Jupyter UI, an open-source library, fills that gap and provides components that a developer can easily integrate in any React.js application.
Problem with JupyterLab for Web developers
In terms of technical stack, the Jupyter(Lab) user interface is built on top of Lumino, which is an imperative way to build user interface and can not be consumed by industry standard declarative frameworks like React.js. As a user interface developer, if you want to create a custom data product on top of Jupyter, you have to stick to Lumino and carry-on the full notebook interface not tailored to your specific needs. This is not what you want. You just want to expose what you need, you want to develop with your favorite toolkit (like React.js) and you also want to integrate on a per-component basis the Jupyter functionality in your application.
JupyterLab is built on the Lumino widget toolkit.
- Lumino allows to wrap React components and expose them as Lumino Widgets.
- React.js can not use Lumino Widgets.
Although a developer can embed a React.js component into JupyterLab, the reverse is not possible.
You can NOT embed JupyterLab into a React.js application.
Jupyter UI at the rescue
To solve that issue, Jupyter UI ships components to easily create a React.js data product compatible with the Jupyter ecosystem. Those components can be used in any React.js application, and also in static websites like Docusaurus, Next.js or Remix. They wrap underneath the JupyterLab code and allow developing React.js applications with code execution capability. State management is based on Redux, and Mobx is to be added.
The Jupyter UI components expose JupyterLab visuals as React.js components and offers a bi-directional communication between React.js/Redux and JupyterLab/Lumino.
Host application -> Redux Observable Actions -> Jupyter UI -> JupyterLab Commands
Host application <- Redux State <- Redux Observable Epics <- Jupyter UI <- JupyterLab Signals
JupyterLab/Lumino is heavily built on top of factories. Jupyter UI uses those to create the ad-hoc widgets. IPyWidgets and Comm are supported. JupyterLite and PyScript support is on the roadmap. Autocompletion is also available.
You can find more context reading this abstract of the talk given at FOSDEM 2022 (video recording).
Examples
The below image shows a gallery of the available React.js components ready to be used in you custom application. These open source components are used to build the online Datalayer platform, a collaborative platform for data analysis.
