doc22940 / scala-notebook

Interactive Scala REPL in a browser

Scala Notebook

A more friendly, browser-based interactive Scala prompt (REPL).

Based on the IPython notebook project, this project will let you interact with Scala in a browser window, which has the following advantages over the standard REPL:

• Easy to view and edit past commands
• Commands can return HTML or images, allowing richer interactivity (charts, for example)
• Notebooks can be saved and loaded, providing a bridge between interactive REPL and classes in a project
• Supports mixing Scala expressions and markdown, letting you create rich, interactive documents similar to Mathematica

While I think this tool will be helpful for everyone using Scala, I expect it to be particularly valuable for the scientific and analytics community.

Using Scala Notebook

Building From Source

• To build and run from SBT, type

project server
run

Development

IDE Setup

• If you're using an IntelliJ project, note that by default IntelliJ will not include SSP files resources. Change settings in IntelliJ to to include '*' as resource extension.

Overview

Having the web server process separate from the process doing the evaluation is also important in Scala; we want to separate the user's actions from the web server, allowing a restart of the client process (after building new client libraries, for example).

To that end, the project is organized as follows:

• server is the web server
• common are the classes shared by both
• observable
• kernel
• subprocess

Architecture

• Server
• Kernel(s)
• Widgets