[ANN] Nextjournal public launch

Community Teaching & Outreach
#1

:tada: We’ve opened signups on Nextjournal today and would love to get your feedback: https://nextjournal.com/mk/public-beta.
Nextjournal is a multi-language notebook platform with first class support for Julia (as well as Python, R, Clojure).
The hosted notebook space is getting a bit crowded, but I believe we offer some unique features that are missing in alternatives:

  • any software and data is backed into a sharable docker container, which greatly improves reproducibility and makes it easy to create base images for other users
  • you can remix any article, which automatically makes all used data & software available in your new article
  • publishing a notebook as a runnable and polished article is one click away
  • you can share notebooks with peers and invite them to collaborate on the same notebook in real-time
  • it’s not based on Jupyter, but one can import Jupyter notebooks and should have all the same features available
  • One can import & export articles as Markdown and all docker images are downloadable, so nobody needs to be afraid to get locked in
  • it’s free for open science (and will stay free) and costs money for private articles and research groups. We’re still figuring out the exact terms, but I’m sure we’ll find a good model for everyone.

For the lazy, a quick walk-through:

Some example articles:
https://nextjournal.com/sdanisch/julia-gpu-programming
https://nextjournal.com/r3tex/loss-landscape
https://nextjournal.com/sdanisch/makie-show
https://nextjournal.com/sdanisch/webio-jscall
https://nextjournal.com/julia/billiard

Now, to play around with e.g. Flux and the FashionMNIST data-set, you should be able to just remix the loss-landscape article, which already has these packages and datasets downloaded, installed and precompiled!

Let me know if you have any questions!

Best,
Simon

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#2

Thanks Simon, this looks really cool! I’ve actually been waiting eagerly to try out nextjournal. I’ll take it for a spin and make sure to provide my feedback.

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#3

I prepared a couple of ahead of time compiled images, which you can simply remix to use:
https://nextjournal.com/julia
The images for those articles are build in these articles:
https://nextjournal.com/julia-environments

If you think a package is missing, or you have another basic image like this, just remix the environments, make your changes and let me know! I can add them to the list of official images!

Best,
Simon

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#4

Hey! I’m trying to check this out and created an account. When I navigate to
https://nextjournal.com/nextjournal/julia-template
and click “remix”, I get to an eternally blank page (with an url looking like this https://nextjournal.com/a/LC8rwjjETwP8bDoGg3jco/edit)

I’m also struggling slightly to understand the relation between an article and a notebook.

Edit: If I manually reload the blank page, it loads OK

#5

I’m also struggling slightly to understand the relation between an article and a notebook.

Sorry about that, they are the same… We historically called it article, but since the term notebook sounds more familiar to people that look for interactive jupyter like articles, we started calling it notebook as well.
I guess we ended up with using both terms because of that :frowning:

#6

Okay, simple :slight_smile:

I’m trying the webio example, is there supposed to appear a slider after the code

using WebSockets, WebIO, Interact, JSCall
@manipulate for i in 1:10
	"hello number: $i"
end

?
The cell evaluates fine, but no output is displayed. I clicked the three dots below the cell (…) and tried choosing display output as webio, but still nothing.

#7

Unfortunately, it seems like WebIO is broken at the moment. I’m looking into it!

#8

Should be fixed now:
https://nextjournal.com/julia/webio-template

1 Like