Jupyter frontends: From the classic Jupyter Notebook to JupyterLab, nteract, and beyond

Description

The Jupyter architecture (message specification, kernels, notebook documents) allows for multiple end-user applications or Jupyter frontends. The traditional application for Jupyter is the classic Jupyter Notebook, which began as the IPython Notebook in 2011. Since then, the Jupyter Notebook frontend has become a critical tool for millions of users doing interactive computing in scientific research, education, and commercial data science, machine learning, and AI. In recent years, a number of more modern end-user applications built on top of the Jupyter architecture have emerged, including Rodeo, CoCalc, Stencila, nteract, and JupyterLab. Project Jupyter is embracing the flowering of end-user applications and taking steps to document and formalize the abstractions across all Jupyter frontends.

Kyle Kelley and Brian Granger offer a broad look at Jupyter frontends, describing their common aspects and explaining how their differences help Jupyter reach a broader set of users. They also share ongoing challenges in building these frontends (real-time collaboration, security, rich output, different Markdown formats, etc.) as well as their ongoing work to address these questions.