Move the Jupyter Dashboards Deployment Projects from Incubator to Attic#

Problem#

Jupyter users want to publish their work outside of their notebook authoring environment in a variety of formats. One such format is that of a standalone, interactive dashboard. We started the dashboards bundler and dashboards server projects to address this desire. The projects, collectively referred to as dashboard deployment hereafter, underwent significant development effort from late-2015 to mid-2016. Development has since stagnated.

Proposal#

We should clearly signal to the broader community that work on the dashboard deployment incubator projects has effectively ceased by moving the following repositories to the jupyter-attic organization on GitHub:

We should use the remainder of this document to capture:

  1. Why the projects should move to the attic according to our governance criteria

  2. Lessons learned from the incubation effort

  3. Ideas for what to do next with respect to Jupyter and dashboards

Why the attic?#

The Jupyter Governance - New Subproject Process lists eight criteria used to evaluate projects for incorporation into one of the official Jupyter organizations. The dashboard deployment projects have been failing to meet at least five of these criteria for some time.

Have an active developer community that offers a sustainable model for future development.#

Members of the original development team have moved on from the project for a variety of reasons. While developers from the broader Jupyter community have opened a handful of pull requests (PRs) over the past year, there are no active maintainers who review PRs, respond to issues, upgrade components, maintain compatibility with other Jupyter projects, write documentation, fix failing tests, and so on.

Have an active user community.#

There is certainly user interest in a dashboard deployment solution for Jupyter notebooks. However, users who have tried the deployment projects have met with limited success given the current complexity of running the full project stack due to lack of work on making it easier over the past year.

Demonstrate continued growth and development.#

Development of new features has ceased. The original project roadmap ends at the current feature set and calls for work to continue on “how dashboarding features materialize in JupyterLab.”.

Integrate well with other official Subprojects.#

The dashboards layout extension defines a notebook metadata format and uses it to persist information about on-screen notebook cell arrangements. The dashboard deployment projects depend on this metadata. No other Jupyter projects support it.

Conversely, the dashboard deployment projects use ipywidgets and various JupyterLab components for interactivity and rendering. These two libraries have undergone major development over the past year as they’ve matured. The dashboard deployment projects have not kept pace, and currently rely on back-level versions.

Have a well-defined scope.#

The dashboards incubator proposal includes a section concerning project scope. The stated objective of “establish[ing] a baseline prototype that demonstrates how notebook authors can publish dashboards” is not, however, clearly documented outside the proposal nor refined in response to evolving technical constraints. Users are left guessing about the scope of “dashboard deployment” supported by the projects.

What did we learn?#

Briefly:

  • The Jupyter community has a variety of perspectives on what a “dashboard” is, whether a dashboard is really the desired artifact for many use cases, how Jupyter users want to author dashboards, what “deploying” a dashboard means, and so on. Having a discussion and coming to some form of consensus on where to focus effort seems prudent.

  • The ability to write any notebook and deploy it anywhere as an interactive web app is too large an undertaking. Constraints on what libraries are supported and how much of the deployment is automated are necessary to set user expectations, manage project scope, and leave room for third-parties to develop solutions atop common specs.

  • We need to clearly note when projects in the incubator are experimental and we are not certain they will succeed.

What might we do next?#

The following list consolidates ideas proposed across various projects. The list is most certainly non-exhaustive.