2022 Jupyter Widgets Dev Meetings

[jasongrout]

Here is a record of the agenda/minutes for our weekly meeting. Everyone is welcome to join.

Let's avoid using this thread for discussion. If you'd like to discuss something in the minutes, open a separate issue and reference this thread.

Meeting Notes

• 20 September 2022
• 13 September 2022
• 06 September 2022
• 30 August 2022
• 23 August 2022
• 16 August 2022
• 9 August 2022
• 2 August 2022
• 26 July 2022
• 19 July 2022
• 12 July 2022
• 5 July 2022
• 28 June 2022
• 21 June 2022
• 14 June 2022
• 7 June 2022
• 31 May 2022
• 24 May 2022
• 17 May 2022
• 10 May 2022
• 03 May 2022
• 26 April 2022
• 19 April 2022
• 12 April 2022
• 5 April 2022
• 29 March 2022
• 15 March 2022
• 8 March 2022
• 1 March 2022
• 22 Feb 2022
• 15 Feb 2022
• 08 Feb 2022
• 01 Feb 2022
• 25 Jan 2022
• 18 Jan 2022
• 11 Jan 2022
• 04 Jan 2022

[jasongrout]

4 Jan 2022

Attendees: @vidartf, @martinRenou, @ibdafna

• Enhancing the contributing.md document ipywidgets#3326

• Should we consider this for 8.0.0? Use control comm target in base Manager ipywidgets#3335

  • @jasongrout: I would love to see this in 8.0

• This week:

  • Add Maarten's PR to the change log
  • Release RC0
  • Try to migrate some of our widget libraries
  • Document any changes pertaining to migrating widget packages from 7.x to 8.x
  • Document Maarten's changes to the protocol spec
  • Release RC1
  • Announce RC

[jasongrout]

11 Jan 2022

Attendees: @vidartf, @martinRenou, @SylvainCorlay, @jasongrout, @ibdafna

• Maarten: Document protocol version 3.0.0 ipywidgets#3343

  • Bump protocol to 3.0, since there are communication channels set up in both directions. Having a browser that understand 2.0 talking to a kernel speaking 3.0 should lead to sliders jumping around (since the echo field is ignored). Having a browser that understands 3 talking to a kernel that understands 2 means that channels that are opened by the browser will be rejected since the major version number does not match in the comm_open of the kernel.

• Martin: Updated Use control comm target in base Manager ipywidgets#3335

  • Needs review
  • Martin will check if there is some heuristic in comm info message to determine if comm target exists or not
  • We should make an update to the docs/ipykernel to have the comm info request have an error status if the comm target does not exist.

• Bug fix with nbconvert HTMLManager: Do not reset lab's CSS variables if they are defined ipywidgets#3342

  • Looks good, basically adds the lab variables as a default for html manager if they are not alreadyd defined on the page
  • Could check the generated code to see if there is a difference with how the css is put on the page in the conditional

[jasongrout]

18 Jan 2022

Attendees: @vidartf, @martinRenou, @SylvainCorlay, @jasongrout, @ibdafna

• Decision-making body: look for an email
• Dependabot config
• Document protocol version 3.0.0 ipywidgets#3343
• Needs review Use control comm target in base Manager ipywidgets#3335
• HTML manager vs JupyterLab manager

[jasongrout]

25 Jan 2022

Attendees: @vidartf, @martinRenou, @ivanov, @jasongrout, @SylvainCorlay, @ibdafna, @maartenbreddels

• Decision-making body
• Should we merge? Use control comm target in base Manager ipywidgets#3335
  • Comm message protocol discussion: how do we determine if a comm target is registered?
    • A target can be registered, comms created, then the target unregistered
    • {target_name: [list of comms]}, and also return active comm targets, filtered by the target_name.
    • Jason will file a JEP proposing two changes: (Update: filed at Pre-proposal: Querying comm targets in the kernel protocol jupyter/enhancement-proposals#86)
• Porting 7.x widgets to 8.x
  • Good test cases:
    • bqplot: uses phosphor ipywidget 8 update bqplot/bqplot#1404 works fine!
    • pythreejs: doesn't use es6 classes yet
    • https://github.com/mariobuikhuizen/ipyvue/pull/55/files
• Consider changing the meeting time for this group?
  • Perhaps after the decision-making body is formed?

[jtpio]

1 Feb 2022

Attendees: @jasongrout, @vidartf, @afonit, @martinRenou, @ibdafna

• Introductions

• Transition from Phosphor CSS class names to Lumino names ipywidgets#3357

• Combobox not rendered correctly (on Chrome and Jupyter Notebook) ipywidgets#3359

• Add note about workaround for editable user installs via pip. ipywidgets#3360

• ensure_python deprecated in python 3.10 ipywidgets#3364

• Validate selection slider values ipywidgets#3365

• Use control comm target in base Manager ipywidgets#3335

• Please comment on Pre-proposal: Querying comm targets in the kernel protocol jupyter/enhancement-proposals#86

• Close to RC. To release RC, resolve:

  • Transition from Phosphor CSS class names to Lumino names ipywidgets#3357
  • Validate selection slider values ipywidgets#3365
  • Leave a major version open for JLab 4 ipywidgets#3350
  • Use control comm target in base Manager ipywidgets#3335

Grids on ipywidgets

• qgrid seems dead, uses slickgrid
• ipyaggrid uses aggrid, also not maintained
• recommend ipydatagrid
• See also feat: add table viewer based in ipyvuetify glue-viz/glue-jupyter#129

Scipy

• Deadline 11 Feb. Tutorial spearheaded by Matt
• Maarten is writing a react-like layer on top of ipywidgets, may submit a talk

[jtpio]

8 Feb 2022

Attendees: @williamstein, @vidartf, @martinRenou, @jtpio, @jasongrout, @ibdafna, @ianhi, @maartenbreddels

Other things that we would need/want for 8.0?

• Add support for widgets in JupyterLab code consoles ipywidgets#3004

PRs for review:

• Update CSS class names for lumino ipywidgets#3366
• Fix downward arrow misalignment for combobox ipywidgets#3367

Merged PRs:

• Fix installation on Python 3.10: Remove obsolete reference to ensure_python ipywidgets#3368
• Run js tests on 7.x in CI ipywidgets#3373
• Documentation: Custom Widgets – Passing URLs ipywidgets#3338
• Use control comm target in base Manager ipywidgets#3335
• Allow Output widget in html manager to render state updates ipywidgets#3370

7.x release

• Martin backporting the control channel
• 7.x minor release later this week

8.0 RC release

• This week after two PRs above merged.

Discussion

• Is there a project that involves building a UI with drag and drop and widgets?

  • Cocalc collaborative whiteboard
  • https://github.com/voila-dashboards/voila-gridstack
  • Databricks has something, but not ipywidgets
  • Internal product (closed source) has been developed
  • ipyflex
  • https://gitlab.com/cosapp/cosapp_lab

• Scipy talks

  • Tutorial going in
  • Maarten talking about building larger ipywidgets applications
  • Jason may submit a talk on core ipywidgets 8 (or maybe a lightning talk, depending on how much stuff there is)
  • Itay may submit a talk about ipydatagrid

• ipywidgets controlling scientific instruments

  • ESRF

• Moving state to the server side

  • Save document from the backend using y-py jupyterlab/jupyterlab#11599

Naive Community Questions (answers above):

Question (@williamstein): is there any existing software that let you do things like insert sliders, buttons, etc., graphically on a canvas, then generate code and uses ipywidgets to implement things under the hood? (Instead of laying everything out via code.) I'm stumbling into implementing something like this, and want to compare notes.

@martinRenou: Do you mean rendering widgets on a canvas?
I remember discussing this with Wolf Vollprecht (having multiple renderers for ipywidgets: DOM, Canvas, Qt etc) this sounds hard to implement to me, but it could be possible? (misunderstood the question)

[martinRenou]

15 Feb 2022

Attendees: @williamstein, @vidartf, @ibdafna, @ivanov

Merged PRs:

• Edit and expand docs for jupyter.widget.control comm channel ipywidgets#3380
• Introduce synchronous has_model function in the manager base class. ipywidgets#3377
• [Backport 7.x] Use control comm target in LabManager ipywidgets#3337

Quick demo:

• @williamstein can show you ipywidgets in his work-in-progress (very buggy!) collaborative whiteboard. (Must be before 10am.)

Releasing 8.0

• @ibdafna to cut the release

[martinRenou]

22 Feb 2022

Attendees: @vidartf, @jasongrout, @SylvainCorlay

Merged PRs:

• Bugfix: fix return key submission of IntText widgets ipywidgets#2975
• Port #3337 and #3377 to master ipywidgets#3389
• Backport PR #3380 on branch master (Edit and expand docs for jupyter.widget.control comm channel) ipywidgets#3387

Discussion points for 8.0:

• Implement update echo messages in a backward-compatible way ipywidgets#3392
  • Jason will work on this this week

[martinRenou]

1 March 2022

Name	Affiliation	GitHub
Jason Grout	Databricks	@jasongrout
Gayle Ollington	NumFOCUS	@gollington
Vidar T Fauske	JP Morgan Chase	@vidartf
Steve Purves	Curvenote	@stevejpurves

Merged PRs:

• Backport #2975 to 7.x: fix return key submission of IntText widgets ipywidgets#3390

• messages.md: fix little typo ipywidgets#3393

• Introductions

  • Gayle Ollington
    • Jupyter Community Building Committee Charter
    • December 2021 Jupyter Community Update
    • Keep an eye out for an upcoming blog post with a survey about JupyterCon
  • Steve Purves
    • co-founder of CurveNote
    • Rowan works a lot on Myst, Steve works a lot on Thebe
    • Working on ipywidgets in Thebe

• Presentations on ipywidgets implementations

  • Pete Blois next week
  • Advertise so others who are implementing ipywidgets can attend
  • Steve Purves: widgets in curvenote

• Echo state updates backwards compatible: Echo state updates in a backwards-compatible way ipywidgets#3394

  • Vidar is reviewing this in the next 36 hours or so.
  • Look at Widget out of sync: fundamental issue? ipywidgets#3111 - is Maarten's case where frontend and backend go out of sync taken care of?

• 7.x and 8.x releases

  • Jason and Itay can do an RC release of 7.7 and 8.0 after #3394 gets merged.

• Jupyter Books (Steve)

  • Executable book implementing something like Like Brett Victor's Tangle library
    • Jason once implemented a ipywidgets widget that used something like the Tangle library to do widgets in text.
  • Reference also recent discussions on Discourse about interpolating variable values into Markdown
  • SageCell
    • https://sagecell.sagemath.org/
    • https://utmost.aimath.org/ (see also the PreText books that integrate Sage Cell, like )

• Executable docs for ipywidgets using JupyterLite: https://twitter.com/martinRenou/status/1498321869363154947?s=20&t=stPowTab4Z9CE00CBPDbrg

[jtpio]

8 March 2022

Name	Affiliation	GitHub
Jason Grout	Databricks	@jasongrout
Vidar T Fauske	JP Morgan Chase	@vidartf
Steve Purves	Curvenote	@stevejpurves
Xiao Chen	Databricks	@xiaochen-db
tonyfast	Quansight	@tonyfast
William Stein	CoCalc	@williamstein
Jared Thompson	CCC	@afonit
Pete Blois	Google	@blois
Florian Wetschoreck	Databricks	@FlorianWetschoreck
Tobias Krabel	Databricks	@tkrabel
Martin Renou	QuantStack	@martinRenou
Hossein Falaki	Databricks	@falaki
Michael Piatek	Databricks	@michaelp-db
Itay Dafna	Bloomberg	@ibdafna
Trung Le	QuantStack	@trungleduc

• Introductions

Merged PRs:

• Echo state updates in a backwards-compatible way
• Limit dependabot to run-time dependencies only

PRs to review:

• Backport echo_update messages to 7.x
• Add migration guide for 8.0
• Follow up on echo updates
• Make sure we serialize dictionary into valid JSON #3408

7.7 and 8.0 RC/release plans

• RC this week?

Other items

• Recording meetings

Pete Blois: ipwyidgets on Colab

• Notes

[jtpio]

15 March 2022

Name	Affiliation	GitHub
Jason Grout	Databricks	@jasongrout
Vidar T Fauske	JP Morgan Chase	@vidartf
William Stein	CoCalc	@williamstein

• William demo'd CoCalc RTC Markdown

• Releases! 7.7.0rc0, 8.0.0rc0

• Will release 7.7.0 final today

• Remaining 8.0 issues on Milestone: https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/milestone/30

  • Migration guide: Add migration guide for 8.0 ipywidgets#3405

• New issue/questions, needs triage:

  • Unobserve doesn't work ipywidgets#3411
    • Is on_click an observer?
  • Scroll Bar not displayed using output widgets and IPython.display ipywidgets#3412

• Question from a user (william) -- comments about upgrading from this -- probably not too bad. Critical to be aware of backend version; make sure it is at least 7.

  • upgrade to new version of ipywidgets sagemathinc/cocalc#5784

~/cocalc/src/packages/frontend$ grep widget package.json 
    "@jupyter-widgets/base": "^1.2.5",
    "@jupyter-widgets/controls": "^1.5.3",
    "@jupyter-widgets/output": "^1.1.5",
    "@phosphor/widgets": "^1.9.3",

• William: I can quickly demo ipywidgets in a whiteboard, since I have it working now...

[jtpio]

29 March 2022

No meeting.

[jtpio]

5 April 2022

Name	Affiliation	GitHub
Jason Grout	Databricks	@jasongrout
Itay Dafna	Bloomberg	@ibdafna
Vidar T Fauske	JP Morgan Chase	@vidartf

• Remaining 8.0 issues on Milestone: https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/milestone/30

• Scipy tutorial was accepted! Scheduled Tuesday morning 8am-12 noon.

What other libraries should we try to convert?

• ipyleaflet
• pythreejs

8.0 release concerns

• 8.0rc is not working in vs code. Hypothesis: if the user has 8.0 installed in the kernel, why doesn't the 7.0 javascript work. It used to work with the 8.0 beta.
• Add support for ipywidgets 8 microsoft/vscode-jupyter#8552

April 19 - Don presenting on widgets in vs code