Personally I love observablehq and cannot use it at work as it's all sensitive information. I'd love to replace big chunks of administration/maintenance/inspection/reporting ui/scripts/whatnot with live notebooks.
Best option atm seems to be Pluto or Jupyter.
ObservableHQ like instance with some basic auth controls would be perfect.
It embeds an observable runtime in a standalone electron app. The interface is not a notebook but rather a dashboard where you can add observable nodes of various sizes. It also has tabs. I find it a lot more manageable for large notebooks, and a lot more user-friendly for business use cases.
Also the standalone app means you can connect to databases and filesystems directly, and avoid CORS for rest apis.
If you’re interested in becoming an early adapter, drop me a line at the email on the website. I’ll be happy to prioritize features that you’d need.
> I'd also appreciate name suggestions for the project (slowly I'm moving away from Starboard)
Keep the name Starboard, create a plugin that does 80% of what casual users who only use Excel for making simple tables want, and then call that Cellboat. The resulting files should be completely self-contained, just like an xlsx; no need to have a copy of Microsoft Office, just an ordinary web browser.
I love this! Any chance for Svelte support? Ive found Svelte to be the most elegant and powerful way to author JS, CSS, and HTML. Would make a great combo!
Typed cells is a step backwards.
ObservableHQs extensive use of JS template literals makes for a much clearer UI and flexible system with a better user experience.
I hope that the folks at observable realize at some point that they should be a GitHub like service in a Notebook ecosystem instead of a monolythic platform.
The host-it-yourself easiest method is to use starboard-wrap [0], it provides a custom HTML element that wraps the sandboxed iframe. Documentation is a bit lacking, but I'm happy to help out. It should work in any framework.
Alternatively you can create your notebook in starboard.gg and embed it using a standard iframe. It depends a bit on what you want your app to do, if you want to integrate "tightly" with the notebook the first will be the better choice.
Yes, this is Javascript. Or well, at least it's web (JS+HTML+CSS).
The difference between this and Jupyter (which I assume you may be familiar with) is that this doesn't talk to a backend server. Most other notebooks do (Jupyter, Livebook, rmarkdown, Spyder, VSCode+Jupyter), which has benefits and disadvantages.
Everything here is in-browser and within a sandboxed iframe, which has the benefit that I can post a notebook where you can actually make changes/interact to an audience of millions without having to spawn a container per user. But also you can embed a notebook on your blog, it's just a webpage.
With WebAssembly being a thing now you can even have Python cells through Pyodide (which includes common scientific packages such as numpy, pandas, matplotlib), and from Python you can interact with Javascript code in the dom. So you could make a notebook that is something like: "Drop your CSV file, parse it using Pandas, visualize it using matplotlib". That's actually really powerful for distributing small programs (<1k LoC) to people who don't have Python installed on their PC.
The about page has some more thoughts on all of this.
The current development dependency on ObservableHQ is unacceptable for me and many others... so this is a game changer.