[IPython-dev] headless IPython

[Toni Alatalo]

Andrew Dalke kirjoitti:
> What I want is an interactive Python session through a web interface.

the PyPy project has nice demos of web interfaces to different kinds of 
python consoles, http://play1.codespeak.net/console/

>    >>> repr(mol)
>    <Molecule object at 0x827f0>)
>    >>> mol
>        .======.
>       /        \
>      /          \
>      \\         //
>       \\       //
>        ``-----''
>         benzene
> SAGE has something like this, but the server part of the
> web-based notebook implementation is not what I want.  For

nice idea :)

in the ipython notebook work we also embedded images to the notebooks, 
that could be made with an interactive python session. i did not see 
that 'graphical repr' idea then, though, but iirc we put the plots using 
explicit commands that ended up in the notebook xml as tags like 
<ipython-figure number="1" type="png" filename="foo.png" caption="This 
is my fantastic plot."/> (that example from 
http://projects.scipy.org/ipython/ipython/wiki/NotebookXML)

i dont know how sage does it, have been a bit out of the loop lately 
being busy with other kind of work. oh btw that other work has been 
largely working on 3d graphics and animations using python, and i just 
now realized (slow me!) that there that sort of visual representations 
of objects would be awesome! soya3d gui toolkit (called pudding) already 
ships with an example where a python shell is running inside the opengl 
using engine, might be well possible to hack that idea there. perhaps 
also to Blender too. besides shapes/geometry would be handy in 
previewing colors etc, perhaps layouts or animation algorithms even in 
those environments.

> example, it doesn't use IPython.  It's built around standard
> exec (at least in 2.0) and the web server code talks to the
> Python shell instance through 'expect' using a protocol

i dont know the details of how the pypy examples work, like do they use 
their javascript frontend somehow, but i guess you can take a look in 
case it seems worthwhile.

> 				Andrew
> 				dalke at dalkescientific.com

thanks for sharing the cool idea,
and good luck in the efforts to make it work :)
~Toni