With pyodide now pretty much established, and from what I can tell, possibly with better optimised/lighter builds on the roadmap, I started wondering again about running Python apps purely in the browser.
One way of doing this is to create ipywidget powered applications in a JuptyerLite context (although I don’t think you can “appify” these yet, Voila style?) but that ties you into the overhead of running JupyterLite.
The React in Python with Pyodide post on the official pyodide blog looked like it might provide a way in to this, but over the weekend I noticed an annoucement from Anaconda regarding Python in the Browser using a new framework called PyScript (examples). This framework provides a (growing?) set of custom HTML components that appear to simplify the process of building pyodide Python powered web apps that run purely in the browser.
I also noticed over the weekend that sqlite_utils and datasette now run in a pyodide context, the latter providing the sql api run against an in-memory database (datasette test example).
The client will also return the datasette HTML, so now I wonder: what would be required to be able to run a datasette app in the JuptyerLite/JupyterLab context? The datasette server must be intercepting the local URL calls somehow, but I imagine that the Jupyter server is ignorant of them. So how could datasette “proxy” its URL calls via JupyterLite so that the local links in the datasette app can be resolved? (We surely wouldn’t want to have to make all the links handled button elements?)
UPDATE 5/5/22: It didn’t take Simon long… Datasette now runs as a full web app in the browser under pyodide. Announcement post here: Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser.
So now I’m wondering again… is there a way to “proxy” a Python app so that it can power a web app, running purely in the browser, via Pyodide?
OUseful.Info, the blog... 