Notes on using Lonboard in a remote (esp JupyterHub) environment about lonboard HOT 2 OPEN

Unsurprisingly, there's been discussion on this before. See especially manzt/anywidget#385 (comment).

Note that the architecture of anywidget is that anywidget serves as a bridge between "fully bundled" widgets that need to be installed in full on the server and "dynamically imported" widgets. Anywidget itself loads the JS from the anywidget-based widget. Therefore only a compatible version of anywidget needs to be installed on the server. In our case, lonboard does not need to be installed on the server, only anywidget.

There are further questions about ensuring compatible versions of anywidget between frontend and server, but that's a more general question outside of lonboard's scope.

Solara also does some nice checks around this: manzt/anywidget#385 (comment)

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FWIW In my own IPYwidget library buckaroo, I addressed some of this.
Users frequently pip installed the library without restarting the server. This causes a JS error with no python error. I added a check on the MTime of the python library, and the start time of the server.

https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo/blob/main/buckaroo/widget_utils.py#L37-L55

I'm interested to hear about other approaches around this problem. It's a really poor experience for an initial user install. Maybe you could source the JS from unpackage when the user would encounter the problem.

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