Talk on IPython frontends and backends for PyData SV 2014
Paul Ivanov was responsible for the Protocol and Frontend portion of the talk.
Thomas Kluyver was responsible for the Kernels and Kernel Spec portion of the talk. See the IJulia, the IHaskell, and the R language notebooks.
May 03 - 2:20 p.m.
Paul Ivanov, Thomas Kluyver
A key idea behind the IPython Notebook is decoupling code execution from user interfaces. IPython relies on a documented JSON protocol, which can be implemented by different frontends and different kernels. By implementing the messaging protocol, new frontends gain the ability to communicate with a kernel regardless of the kernel implementation language. Conversely, new kernels automatically gain access to the existing client ecosystem. The IPython project maintains three different frontends, and there are multiple third party frontends and kernels already in use. We'll describe some important features of the messaging protocol, before demonstrating some of our alternative frontends, including vim-ipython and bipython. We'll show kernels that people have written in other languages, such as Julia and R, and preview the upcoming features that will expose these alternative kernels in the Notebook user interface. This talk is proposed jointly by Paul Ivanov and Thomas Kluyver, both core IPython developers.
