Project Jupyter


Project Jupyter is a nonprofit organization created to "develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages". Spun-off from IPython in 2014 by Fernando Pérez, Project Jupyter supports execution environments in several dozen languages. Project Jupyter's name is a reference to the three core programming languages supported by Jupyter, which are Julia, Python and R, and also a homage to Galileo's notebooks recording the discovery of the moons of Jupiter. Project Jupyter has developed and supported the interactive computing products Jupyter Notebook, JupyterHub, and JupyterLab, the next-generation version of Jupyter Notebook.

History

In 2014, Fernando Pérez announced a spin-off project from IPython called Project Jupyter. IPython continues to exist as a Python shell and a kernel for Jupyter, while the notebook and other language-agnostic parts of IPython moved under the Jupyter name. Jupyter is language agnostic and it supports execution environments in several dozen languages among which are Julia, R, Haskell, Ruby, and of course Python.
In 2015, GitHub and the Jupyter Project announced native rendering of Jupyter notebooks file format on the GitHub platform.

Philosophy

Project Jupyter's operating philosophy is to support interactive data science and scientific computing across all programming languages via the development of open-source software. According to the Project Jupyter website, "Jupyter will always be 100% open-source software, free for all to use and released under the liberal terms of the modified BSD license".

Products

Jupyter Notebook

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive computational environment for creating Jupyter notebook documents. The "notebook" term can colloquially make reference to many different entities, mainly the Jupyter web application, Jupyter Python web server, or Jupyter document format depending on context. A Jupyter Notebook document is a JSON document, following a versioned schema, and containing an ordered list of input/output cells which can contain code, text, mathematics, plots and rich media, usually ending with the ".ipynb" extension.
A Jupyter Notebook can be converted to a number of open standard output formats through "Download As" in the web interface, via the library or "jupyter nbconvert" command line interface in a shell. To simplify visualisation of Jupyter notebook documents on the web, the nbconvert library is provided as a service through which can take a URL to any publicly available notebook document, convert it to HTML on the fly and display it to the user.
Jupyter Notebook provides a browser-based REPL built upon a number of popular open-source libraries:
Jupyter Notebook can connect to many kernels to allow programming in many languages. By default Jupyter Notebook ships with the IPython kernel. As of the 2.3 release, there are currently 49 Jupyter-compatible kernels for many programming languages, including Python, R, Julia and Haskell.
The Notebook interface was added to IPython in the 0.12 release, renamed to Jupyter notebook in 2015. Jupyter Notebook is similar to the notebook interface of other programs such as Maple, Mathematica, and SageMath, a computational interface style that originated with Mathematica in the 1980s. According to The Atlantic, Jupyter interest overtook the popularity of the Mathematica notebook interface in early 2018.

Jupyter kernels

A Jupyter kernel is a program responsible for handling various types of requests, and providing a reply. Kernels talk to the other components of Jupyter using ZeroMQ over the network, and thus can be on the same or remote machines. Unlike many other Notebook-like interfaces, in Jupyter, kernels are not aware that they are attached to a specific document, and can be connected to many clients at once. Usually kernels allow execution of only a single language, but there are a couple of exceptions.

JupyterHub

JupyterHub is a multi-user server for Jupyter Notebooks. It is designed to support many users by spawning, managing, and proxying many singular Jupyter Notebook servers. While JupyterHub requires managing servers, third-party services like Jupyo provide an alternative to JupyterHub by hosting and managing multi-user Jupyter notebooks in the cloud.

JupyterLab

JupyterLab is the next-generation user interface for Project Jupyter. It offers all the familiar building blocks of the classic Jupyter Notebook in a flexible and powerful user interface. The first stable release was announced on February 20, 2018.

Industry adoption

The Jupyter Notebook has become a popular user interface for cloud computing, and major cloud providers have adopted the Jupyter Notebook or derivative tools as a frontend interface for cloud users. Examples include Amazon's SageMaker Notebooks, Google's Colaboratory and Microsoft's Azure Notebook.

Colaboratory

Colaboratory is a free Jupyter notebook environment that runs in the cloud and stores its notebooks on Google Drive. Colab was originally an internal Google project; an attempt was made to open source all the code and work more directly upstream, leading to the development of the "Open in Colab" Google Chrome extension, but this eventually ended, and Colab development continued internally. the Colaboratory UI only allows you to create notebooks with Python 2 and Python 3 kernels; however, if you have an existing notebook whose kernelspec is IR or Swift, that will work, since both R and Swift are installed in the container. Julia language can also work on Colab.

Media coverage