Notes on using Lonboard in a remote (esp JupyterHub) environment about lonboard HOT 4 OPEN

I just installed jupyterlab directly in my lonboard env, launched JLab from that env and bingo.

FWIW this is what I usually do personally.

For other cases, all you need is to install anywidget in the JupyterLab environment, so that anywidget's JS code exists in JupyterLab when you start the page. Then you can install lonboard separately inside a user environment. You do have to ensure that the anywidget version on the backend (in JupyterLab) and anywidget in the user environment is semver compatible.

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Unsurprisingly, there's been discussion on this before. See especially manzt/anywidget#385 (comment).

Note that the architecture of anywidget is that anywidget serves as a bridge between "fully bundled" widgets that need to be installed in full on the server and "dynamically imported" widgets. Anywidget itself loads the JS from the anywidget-based widget. Therefore only a compatible version of anywidget needs to be installed on the server. In our case, lonboard does not need to be installed on the server, only anywidget.

There are further questions about ensuring compatible versions of anywidget between frontend and server, but that's a more general question outside of lonboard's scope.

Solara also does some nice checks around this: manzt/anywidget#385 (comment)

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FWIW In my own IPYwidget library buckaroo, I addressed some of this.
Users frequently pip installed the library without restarting the server. This causes a JS error with no python error. I added a check on the MTime of the python library, and the start time of the server.

https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo/blob/main/buckaroo/widget_utils.py#L37-L55

I'm interested to hear about other approaches around this problem. It's a really poor experience for an initial user install. Maybe you could source the JS from unpackage when the user would encounter the problem.

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discussion on this before. See especially manzt/anywidget#385 (comment).

says "... a virtual environment (Python venv, Conda environment or what have you) where package jupyterlab has been deployed — one deploys their widget package in the same environment as where Jupyter Lab lives" (bold mine).

When I was running for example your NYC building notebook from a Jupyter Lab instance launched from my jupyterlab conda env -- to which I had made my lonboard conda env visible as a kernel with the usual ipykernel dance -- I was having rendering issues e.g.

[1] m
Map(layers=[PolygonLayer(extruded=True, get_elevation=<pyarrow.lib.FloatArray object at 0x0000028B03972680>
[
…

And similar errors for ScatterPlot layers and viz([])

In order to fix this, I just installed jupyterlab directly in my lonboard env, launched JLab from that env and bingo.

Unless there's a "JS dance" to expose the JS of conda envs in kernels exported to jupyterlab, I think that means we need to duplicate jupyterlab installs for those conda envs where there is JS.

lonboard v. '0.9.3' in Jupyter Lab 4.2.1

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