USECASES.md

Use Cases

work in progress -- may not match current behavior

Eric is our end user. Eric doesn't know any Python. He wants to see Python in his browser as much as he wants to see PHP in his browser.

Paula is our Pythonista. Paula isn't a web developer, or even an app developer, but she loves IPython Notebooks and creates ones that she would like to be able to share as "graphical scripts" with her colleagues, like Eric. Those colleagues want to run them but not have to look at or touch any code.

Simple app view of a notebook

Eric: conda launch "Power Series.ipynb"

end user:

• Eric's default browser opens up with an input form asking for the parameters required to run the notebook Power Series.ipynb

• "Power Series.ipynb" is found in the current directory, and the abspath to this is passed to the nbapp server

• conda launch checks to see if the nbapp server is running, and if not, starts it.

• the notebook will be invoked in the directory where it is found, so any file operations are relative to that location (this may be on a remote server)

developer:

• Paula wrote Power Series.ipynb. She needs to specify the interface spec:

  • this can be added as JSON to the notebook meta-data (either by hand or by a magic)
  • or to the last cell in the NB by marking it raw and using JSON

• The first cell in the notebook contains "model" or "example" inputs, so the notebook is fully runable as a regular notebook "out of the box" without any extra machinery. When the notebook is run as an app, this cell will be replaced with the user-provided arguments.