[IPython-dev] experiment - remote execution of jquery and d3 code into the browser via ipython

[Brian Granger]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 6:23 PM, fawce <fawce at quantopian.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 19, 2012, at 8:51 PM, Brian Granger wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 5:27 PM, hugo <hugo at continuum.io> wrote:
>>> ah - interesting, I didn't quite understand it at first.
>>>
>>> I think that would work, however in the d3 case, I think performance
>>> would be an issue, d3 uses callbacks for everything.  for a scatter
>>> plot, each circle needs at least 2 callbacks, one for x coordinate, one
>>> for y coordinate, that would be one round trip communication per point!
>>> for local work, this might be ok, but it probably won't work in a
>>> traditional client server setup, especially if you get many points.
>>>
>>> I think for me - the complexity involved in this is enough to convince
>>> me that this is the wrong approach.  It was an interesting experiment
>>> but I'm going to give up on this path, I think a preferable route is to
>>> implement higher level plots (scatter, lines, image plots, etc..) which
>>> only take json serialiseable data as args, and then just call those from
>>> ipython.
>>
>> I strongly agree with this assessment.  In general we are -1 on adding
>> new web socket connections and trying to manage Javascript/Python
>> communications at a fine grained level.  Things like interactive plots
>> should simply take JSON data at the beginning and they work with it on
>> the client side.
>
> Sorry for the poor suggestion, I just didn't know d3 was so chatty.
> Highcharts works the way you're suggesting, and also has good support for incrementally adding data. It is a very nice library, and we're pushing a lot of updates to it via websockets.  The tradeoff, which I think comes with the high-level chart design, is that you sacrifice flexibility in the rendering -- you can only use the chart types that exist in the library.

I think we will (in the long run) be able to push/pull data to
Javascript code like you are mentioning.  But it will require some
very careful design to do properly.  We have started to think about
these abstractions but have lots of work to go still.

>>
>>
>>>>
>>>> fawce's suggestion sounds very intriguing--make the websockets message
>>>> passing two-way between python and javascript.  The way I understand the
>>>> suggestion, what about (in python):
>>>>
>>>> def mycallback(d):
>>>>       return d3.axis(d['x'])
>>>>
>>>> d3.selectAll('circle').attr('cx', callback(mycallback));
>>>>
>>>> This gets translated to the javascript code:
>>>>
>>>> d3.selectAll('circle'.attr('cx', function(){
>>>> var results= send_message('mycallback', arguments);
>>>> return interpret_results(results);})
>>>>
>>>> send_message sends a message back through websockets to call the
>>>> mycallback python function with some sort of proxy object d that knows
>>>> how to generate json messages describing the attribute accesses, etc.
>>>> In the python side, inside mycallback, d['x'] generates the javascript
>>>> code to access arguments[0]['x'], so what is passed back is some sort of
>>>> javascript code like 'd3.axis(arguments[0]['x'])'.  interpret_results
>>>> then runs this code and returns the result.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Jason
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>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Brian E. Granger
>> Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
>> bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com
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>
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-- 
Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com