[IPython-dev] Fwd: [SciTech] ActivePapers Python edition

[Brian Granger]

Yes, it shouldn't be difficult at all to create an ActivePapers
backend for storing notebooks. But in some ways it would also be nice
to have this type of conversion in nbconvert.

Cheers,

Brian

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Konrad,
>
> On 3 December 2013 08:34, Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen at fastmail.net> wrote:
>>
>> My idea for integrating IPython notebooks into ActivePapers is to
>> store notebooks inside the ActivePapers HDF5 files and treat each cell
>> in a notebook like a calclet. Apart from writing all the interface
>> code, the main challenge is how and where to store provenance tracking
>> information. In ActivePapers, a calclet is an HDF5 dataset (containing
>> a string) whose metadata contains the dependency information. One
>> approach would eb to keep this representation and thus turn a notebook
>> into a sequence of HDF5 datasets. At the other extreme, one could
>> store notebooks in their native JSON representation inside an
>> ActivePaper and insert the dependency information in the JSON code, or
>> in a supplementary HDF5 dataset.
>
>
> Our JSON format does have a concept of cell metadata, where this kind of
> information could be stored. But it would also be interesting to see
> notebook cells with contents stored in HDF5 datasets. We have considered the
> possibility of having cells stored externally to the notebook, so you could
> have a cell whose contents were stored in a plain Python file, which could
> then be shared between multiple notebooks.
>
> It shouldn't be too hard to work with notebooks stored in a different format
> - you'd need to write a custom notebook server which translates to a JSON
> structure to load a notebook, and translates back to your own format when
> it's saved. That's handled in the FileNotebookManager class:
> https://github.com/ipython/ipython/blob/master/IPython/html/services/notebooks/filenbmanager.py#L37
>
> Best wishes,
> Thomas
>
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-- 
Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com