Jupyterlab-hdf5 does not currently support JupyterLab 4.x

[athornton]

Problem

jupyterlab-hdf5 is not JupyterLab 4.x compatible

Proposed Solution

That's the question: is jupyterlab-hdf5 actively maintained?

If so: is there already work underway to make this extension work as a prebuilt JL4+ extension?

If not: is there something else that provides equivalent functionality?

If the answer to that is also "no", are there other sites that feel like their desire for a JL4-compatible HDF extension approaches "need" ?

Additional context

I'm slowly getting the Rubin Science Platform migrated to JupyterLab 4 and am taking inventory of what extensions that we use are already there, and which ones either need updating or removal from our environment. Obviously the Rubin Observatory would prefer not to take ownership of the HDF server and lab extensions, but I think we're probably going to need HDF5 support. So knowing what Jupyter's status and intentions vis-a-vis this extension are would help us define and prioritize development work.

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[loichuder]

Disclaimer: the views stated below are my own and do not reflect the Jupyter org opinion nor @telamonian opinion (the original author)

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Hello @athornton. See my answers below.

That's the question: is jupyterlab-hdf5 actively maintained?

Not really. I became the de facto maintainer but my current work is steering me away from JLab.

If so: is there already work underway to make this extension work as a prebuilt JL4+ extension?

There is not, as far as I am aware.

If not: is there something else that provides equivalent functionality?

My team developed the H5Web HDF5 viewer in React and made it available as a JupyterLab extension (even as a VSCode extension for that matters)

H5Web still receives continuous updates and we recently released a JLab 4 version of the extension thanks to a great external contribution. As far as I know, H5Web provides all the features of jupyterlab-hdf5 (file exploration, HDF5 entity inspection, visualization of data as tables) but also provides 1D (curve) and 2D (images) visualization of data.

Perhaps jupyterlab-hdf5 has the advantage of better dealing with custom drives (like HDF5 stored in S3 or others) ? Not sure as I am not using them myself.

But while I tried to give minimal maintenance to this extension (a few bugfixes here, a few dep upgrades there), now it feels like duplicating the maintenance effort a bit.

Anyway, I am open to any input on this. If you think jupyterlab-hdf5 is better suited for what you are trying to do, we can discuss further maintenance plans.

[athornton]

I will try H5Web and take a look. We need an HDF5 viewer but I don't think we really care a lot which implementation it is. We may at some point want to look at things that aren't POSIX filesystems but I think I'm fine starting out there.

[athornton]

H5Web seems like it will work fine for us. I'm going to create a pull request that puts, near the top of the README, a note saying that H5Web should in general be preferred.

[athornton]

#148