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Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

voila.readthedocs.io

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Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#51

Post by willj »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #42

I have a question about hosting costs - not a SW. Suppose I write some educational Jupyter notebooks, which are not particularly resource intensive, say 100 seconds of compute time per notebook. I host them on some cloud server, using something like OP, and get a 1000 people to learn from it. Maybe they end up using say, 1000 people x 5 notebooks x 100 seconds/run x 20 runs of each notebook = 10 million seconds of co…

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this option already, but Google Colab sounds ideal for this situation. People get a copy of your notebook, which they can run, edit, and try new things, and all the computational resources are free. It even offers access to GPU. It’s a surprisingly robust resource. There are runtime limits, but they’re something like 12 hours, so your use case fits in there easily. Hope this helps!

Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#52

Post by protoduction »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #42

I have a question about hosting costs - not a SW. Suppose I write some educational Jupyter notebooks, which are not particularly resource intensive, say 100 seconds of compute time per notebook. I host them on some cloud server, using something like OP, and get a 1000 people to learn from it. Maybe they end up using say, 1000 people x 5 notebooks x 100 seconds/run x 20 runs of each notebook = 10 million seconds of co…

You could consider an in browser notebook to get your cost down to near nothing - it depends a bit on what kind of tasks your students do whether they fit in the browser (one wouldn't train a large neural network in one for instance)

There's Starboard (which I'm building, it's built specifically for the browser and can integrate into a larger app deeply) and JupyterLite (the closest you will get to JupyterLab in the browser), either can be a good choice depending on your requirements. Both use Pyodide for the Python runtime.

[1]: https://github.com/gzuidhof/starboard-notebook, demo: https://starboard.gg

[2]: https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#53

Post by lysecret »

I love jupyter notebooks but I think the way they have be to be used is in a "throw away" fashion. E.g. use it to explore data, develop some algorithm, then put it to PY files. It is there to develop something which is worth versioning. I think in this way this seems like a cool addition: To evaluate the worthiness of the algo you might need to show it some people, this is where this comes into play.

Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#54

Post by protoduction »

mg wrote: post #3

It seems this is doing round trips to the server to do the calculations? I often think that with the current state of Javascript in the browser, we could build an awesome, super fast, Jupyter style notebook software that runs completely in the browser. With the modules implemented as native Javascript modules which are dynamically loaded. Is anybody working on this? I have built a rough version of this idea for mysel…

Check out Starboard (https://starboard.gg, I'm the creator). I think it's exactly what you're looking for (you can use plain dom, html, css, javascript, python).

Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#55

Post by matsemann »

fxtentacle wrote: post #16

Tried their example link: "Problem: package xeus-cling-0.12.0-h5a79028_0 requires xtl >=0.7.0, sigh I don't know when it started, but it seems to be a recent trend to add dependencies for anything and to package everything on demand. It's probably for security or something. But I do miss the days when people would link a static binary that "just works" even without internet and that'll keep working a week later, beca…

Python is especially bad at getting things up and running. Often ends up with a mix of conda and pip stuff, different python installs through pyenv or similar, some global installed version of cuda, jupyterlab etc., wheels not created for your particular platform and version of python making you have to install a whole c++ toolchain etc. It's bonkers.

Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#56

Post by jstx1 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #45
jstx1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a data scientist I spend more time writing software and building things than I spend doing statistical analysis (and I like it that way). That's why I consider it part of software development. Don't be tripped up by the word "scientist" in the job title (I wrote another comment about this in this thread). Also, it's a very broad field and it varies a lot from company to company - if you've had some interactions wi…

If you want to play with names and semantics, I'll leave you to it. That's not my point.

Well, my overall point was that you got the names and semantics wrong.

Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#57

Post by matsemann »

mg wrote: post #3

It seems this is doing round trips to the server to do the calculations? I often think that with the current state of Javascript in the browser, we could build an awesome, super fast, Jupyter style notebook software that runs completely in the browser. With the modules implemented as native Javascript modules which are dynamically loaded. Is anybody working on this? I have built a rough version of this idea for mysel…

My usecase for jupyter notebooks often is to use the server to calculate stuff, though. I rent some beefy 16 cpu, 128gb ram, tesla p100 machine so that my laptop won't melt.

Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#58

Post by nxpnsv »

mkl wrote: post #34
nxpnsv wrote: post #31

Would it be crazy to add Viola: to the title of this sub?

> Would it be crazy to add Viola: to the title of this sub? Yes, because it's called "Voilà" :-) But I agree, starting the title with "Turns" is pretty bizarre.

Hahah yes that would be crazy. Indeed, "Voilà: ..." would be more appropriate.

Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#59

Post by rhizome31 »

Last time I checked, Voilà was very slow for anything but the simplest dashboards. This may or may not be a problem depending on the context as instant page load isn't always needed but it's a an aspect to take into account. So my friendly advice is to do your benchmarks with real-world use cases before investing time in this solution.

Re: Voila – From notebooks to standalone web applications and dashboards

#60

Post by abdullahkhalids »

qayxc wrote: post #48
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #42

I have a question about hosting costs - not a SW. Suppose I write some educational Jupyter notebooks, which are not particularly resource intensive, say 100 seconds of compute time per notebook. I host them on some cloud server, using something like OP, and get a 1000 people to learn from it. Maybe they end up using say, 1000 people x 5 notebooks x 100 seconds/run x 20 runs of each notebook = 10 million seconds of co…

This could cost anywhere from nothing (e.g. free) to 3-figures (in USD) depending on the specifics. How many users are accessing the notebooks concurrently (e.g. all 1000 or only a dozen at a given time)? Is there any downtime, i.e. do the users come from the same time zone, so that app can have inactive hours (say it's OK to be unreachable during the night)? Depending on the specifics, free hosting may be available…

We run a non-profit minimal-budget workshop where currently hundreds of people work together at the same time, but they run code on their own computer. But making people install Jupyter and other python packages on their computer is difficult. So we are exploring the possibility of the hosting the notebooks ourselves.

We don't want options like Google Colab, because we want the experience to be tightly integrated (there are also issues around GDPR). So we want to run our own server.

If we can run a ten-day workshop of 500-1000 people, where most people work everyday at the same time in a 5 hour slot, and keep costs under 50-100 usd, we would make the switch. But I understand that it is difficult to make estimates without trying how much resource usage there actually is.

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