[IPython-dev] Website

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 1 June 2011 10:48, Harry Percival <harry at resolversystems.com> wrote:

> we've been lurking on the list for a few weeks.  We hope to have IPython
> support in PythonAnywhere in the next week or two.  If you guys are keen, we
> could probably serve up a "try it now" iframe, with a live IPython
> interpreter for people to use, straight from your site...


Personally, I love the idea of a 'try it now' feature: its hard to give a
good impression of an interactive environment using screenshots.

My main concern would be to what extent it's actually IPython we're demoing.
We don't currently have a web-based console, so I assume you've written a
lot of your own code for the user interaction. On the one hand, we don't
want people getting a poor impression due to the limitations of the web
browser, or due to flaws in code we can't correct (not that I expect your
code to be bad, but all non-trivial software has bugs). On the other hand,
if you've added extra features, we don't want the demo to promise something
we can't deliver on the desktop. In short, if we do this, what we show needs
to be as 'pure IPython' as possible.

Other thoughts:
- Are you basing it on IPython 0.10.x (the current stable version), or 0.11
(the version we'll release soon)?
- I assume your console will run in any modern web browser? It's not going
to display an 'install Silverlight' button, like certain
alternatives<http://www.trypython.org/>,
is it? ;-)
- I'm guessing your parts of the code are proprietary. I don't have a
problem with that, but I honestly don't know whether it could stir up
feelings if we're seen as promoting your business.

I hope more people will chime in on this as it reaches a civilised time in
their own time zones.

Thanks,
Thomas
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