

Introducing the PiCloud Notebook - usaar333
http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the-picloud-notebook/

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scorpion032
The iPython Notebook is really amazing which is seriously under utilised and
under marketed.

Every "I will teach beginner to program" site these days creates a new
platform which starts with "Enter you name in quotes" ends up re-inventing the
whole server-client console thing. Not every one of these platforms does a
great job at it.

All you need really is an iPython notebook (which btw can also be used for
alternative languages, there is a fork that runs ruby) which has alternative
"markdown cells" and the "console cell".

The tech behind the whole thing is rather impressive. It uses zMQ, Tornado and
can connect multiple client terminals to the given server.

This can be integrated for development with web frameworks like django/flask
and can be very useful for debugging.

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steve918
Was expecting a Raspberry Pi Laptop connected to iCloud or something.

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ElCapitanMarkla
Yeah I don't see any reason for this to be PiCloud over PyCloud. I don't know
how long it's been named PiCloud but it seems like they're trying to cash in
on Raspberry Pis success.

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usaar333
PiCloud dev here. PiCloud has been in existence since early 2009. That we
share a "Pi" with Raspberry Pi is just a coincidence; it didn't even exist
when we were founded.

We aren't named PyCloud as that would imply we are solely for python, which we
are not. While we have very close ties to python (namely the powerful language
bindings), we support every programming language.

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csense
Things the service needs to explain before I'd consider buying it:

Similar technology already exists in the form of Sage [1]. How is this
different or better?

From a business standpoint, it's great to host the running code server-side:
You can measure usage and charge heavy users, and you have a decent excuse to
do so (market expectation that servers resources cost money). But what
advantages does this offer that client-side Python in the browser, Skulpt [2],
does not?

Also, "a notebook...allows you to explore the system that a job sees...You
can...Peek around the filesystem...Run non-Python programs..." I _really_ hope
each user runs in their own VM for security's sake.

[1] <http://sagemath.org>

[2] <http://www.skulpt.org>

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usaar333
PiCloud dev here.

The IPython notebook feature itself is comparable to other offerings. The
advantage of PiCloud's offering is that it is not just a web-based python; it
also is the interface to a supercomputer that you can leverage with the cloud
library (<http://www.picloud.com/platform/>). As long as you wish to make use
of that supercomputer, the notebook allows you to run an interactive
interpreter on your already configured PiCloud environment.

As far as security goes, every user is run in separate LXC containers.
(<http://lxc.sourceforge.net/>)

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zemanel
Any of you had success setting up ipython notebook with IPC transport? Been
trying to setup an out of the box project for running it on the free Openshift
paas, in which you can only bind to an internal ip and some internal/external
ports, but only managed to use ipc by forcing the config value somewhere on
the call stack, as it always uses tcp.

from the feature merge on ipython repo, it seems it may be a bug or unfinished
work.

will look deeper.

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endlessvoid94
Seems to me like hosted ipython notebooks could be a product all its own.

I can imagine an instant evaluation aspect to this - on keyup
(_.debounce'd).fireEvent('play') - an awesomely tight feedback loop, light-
table-esque.

makes me excited for some better tools on their way.

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tluyben2
I always liked this way of working since first touching Mathematica; does it
exist for other languages? (I think there already was one for Python before,
not browser based?)

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StavrosK
ipython has notebooks, but they _are_ browser-based.

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tluyben2
Yeah which is fine; I just remembered another Python notebook environment but
that might have been just this one :) Unfortunately I don't get to work with
Python much.

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xnyhps
It somewhat reminds me of <http://www.sagemath.org/>.

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pwang
The IPython notebook came after the SAGE notebook, but it seems to be gaining
popularity faster in the broader scientific Python community. (The SAGE
community tends to be more oriented towards pure math.) SAGE is a very
powerful system and introduced many cool things very early on, but it
definitely is a bit of its own island in the scientific python landscape. I
don't know if that's because of the licensing (it's GPL) or the software
distribution logistics or what.

