This might of interest to people here. In theory we could refactor Reason to use the IPython kernel, with these developments. My attempts to do so earlier in the year were blocked on exactly this set of changes going in. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Fernando Perez Date: Thu, May 31, 2012 at 8:30 PM Subject: [IPython-dev] Another monster landed: refactored JavaScript, new tooltips and interactive widgets in the notebook To: IPython Development list , IPython User list Hi folks, After the merge of the previous big two branches (the merging of the interactive and parallel kernels into one object and the magics refactoring/cell support), the third monster we had in flight has now landed: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/1711/ For those of you not following the github hooks obsessively, here's the high-level view of the goodies: - New graphical tooltip with keyboard control: successive presses of the TAB key will expand it, pin it for 10 s (a clock icon is shown), and send its content to the bottom help pager (which is now resizable). - Completer has been refactored into a new class and now can analyze the current cell to support completions on objects that don't exist in the kernel yet (because the cell hasn't been executed). - All the client-side JavaScript has been decoupled to ease reuse of parts of the machinery without having to build a full-blown notebook. This will make it much easier to communicate with an IPython kernel from existing web pages and to integrate single cells into other sites, without loading the full notebook document-like UI. - This refactoring also enables the possibility of writing dynamic javascript widgets that are returned from Python code and that present an interactive view to the user, with callbacks in Javascript executing calls to the Kernel.  This will enable many interactive elements to be added by users in notebooks. An example of this capability has been provided as a proof of concept in `docs/examples/widgets` that lets you directly communicate with one or more parallel engines, acting as a mini-console for parallel debugging and introspection. Kudos to Brian and Matthias for the excellent work they put into this, it was over 84 commits and involved the merging of several intermediate pull requests.  But the goodies shipped therein should be *very*  useful. We've seen recently attempts at interactive plots with d3/flot and other similar tools; now the machinery is ready to do that cleanly, so by all means have fun! Cheers, f _______________________________________________ IPython-dev mailing list IPython-dev@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/ipython-dev