Support Pluto notebooks for Julia

[droodman]

The new support for Julia is wonderful!

But for this to really explode, I think we need support for Pluto notebooks. I have built a reactive application in Pluto that I would love to share with the world in a way that just works with a few clicks. I've found some half-solutions, but what I wanted all along is support for Julia and Pluto in Colab.

No doubt @metrizable knows what I mean.

[blegat]

@droodman Even if it is hacky, I'd be interested n the half-solution you have found

[j-fu]

There is a repo for Pluto on binder: https://github.com/fonsp/pluto-on-binder by @fonsp . (I am not familiar with the architecure behind neither colab nor binder, but I put this here just in case this might be helpful).

[droodman]

@blegat the main option I explored was CoCalc. This is a commercial product with a pricing structure that works well for academics. It's a small company and they are eager to work with customers to understand and respond to new needs. They've done great things to allow live collaboration on Jupyter notebooks. They support Pluto, but not to the same degree. I got a Pluto notebook hosted on one of their instances (really a Google Cloud instance), and made it publicly accessible through a private link. But it was not like Colab in that new users could not easily make their own copies of the notebook. If two people used it at once, they were editing the same set of parameters, stepping on each other's toes. They were both talking to the same back-end Julia instance.

I tried Pluto on Binder and found it super-slow. My application requires some serious CPU time to be adequately responsive, like you get with a high-end laptop with 10 fast CPU cores. It could be reimplemented for GPU. Either way, the user I have in mind would be willing to pay a little $ to Google Colab, say, for adequate compute.

I saw one other option, https://glassnotebook.io, that runs on top of a Pluto notebook in a public GitHub repo. My project is currently private, so that didn't work for me. And maybe Glass Notebook is dead now.

IIRC, JuliaHub also offers Pluto notebook hosting, but their pricing structure only makes sense if you're a big corporation.

[blegat]

I could make it work using localtunnel, see this colab notebook for a full example.
It is adapted from this one that @VarLad shared on the general channel of the Julia slack.

[metrizable]

I know this doesn't directly fulfill the request, but one could use Colab's kernel proxy port to allow one to open a Pluto notebook on your Colab VM:

using Pkg

Pkg.add("Pluto", io=devnull)

using Pluto

port = 1234
@async Pluto.run(; port=port, require_secret_for_open_links=false, require_secret_for_access=false)

Then, using the same mechanism exposed in the google.colab Python library, one can obtain a link through Colab's proxy to the host:

using IJulia

display(HTML("""
<div id="js-output"></div>
<script>(async (port, element) => {
    var outputDiv = document.getElementById('js-output');
    const url = await google.colab.kernel.proxyPort(port);
    const anchor = document.createElement('a');
    anchor.href = new URL('/', url).toString();
    anchor.target = '_blank';
    anchor.setAttribute('data-href', url + '/');
    anchor.textContent = 'https://localhost:' + port;
    outputDiv.appendChild(anchor);
  }) ($port, window.element)
</script>"""))

You can then visit the output link to open Pluto connected to your Colab VM: