Interactive Plotting
All of BeakerX’s JVM languages plus Python and JavaScript have APIs
for interactive
time-series,
scatter plots, histograms, heatmaps, and treemaps. The widgets remain
interactive in both notebooks saved to disk, and notebooks published
to the web. They include unique features for handling many points,
nanosecond resolution, zooming, and exporting.
Interactive Tables
BeakerX’s table
widget
automatically recognizes pandas dataframes and allows you to search,
sort, drag, filter, format, select, graph, hide, pin, and export to
CSV or clipboard. This makes connecting to spreadsheets quick and
easy.
Spark Integration
BeakerX has a Spark
magic
with GUIs for configuration, status, progress, and interrupt of Spark
jobs.
You can either use the GUI or create your own SparkSession with code.
The GUI has links to documentation and the standard Spark web UI.
Publication
With a single click, convert the current notebook’s contents including
any interactive widgets to a Github gist. A new tab opens nbviewer on
it, including the active widgets. This is a link you can send anyone.
BeakerX is the successor to Beaker Notebook.
After seeing the demo of
Jupyter Lab at SciPy 2016
we realized that Jupyter had become extensible enough that much of
what made Beaker special could be done in the Jupyter ecosystem.
The result of joining forces with Jupyter is a more powerful tool for
our users, and a larger community of developers and users that
continues to grow. Jupyter users benefit by getting access to our
work as well. And we benefit by leveraging shared infrastructure so
we can focus on adding value.
It has taken about a year to port Beaker’s key features to become
extensions to Jupyter, and we are very excited to finish this
transition and release the results with a new name “BeakerX” that
represents both our history and how large a change this is.
What about classic Beaker’s polyglot and autotranslation features?
Beaker Notebook (before BeakerX) is known for supporting polyglot
programming, and for autotranslating data between languages. These
features have been the most difficult to fit into Jupyter.
BeakerX has polyglot magics to allow running multiple languages in the
same notebook, and it supports bidirectional autotranslation as well,
however its implementation is not yet as complete as the original.
Can I install BeakerX with pip instead of conda?
Yes, see the instructions. Our documentation
focuses on conda for simplicity.
Can I use BeakerX on win32?
Win32 is not supported because OpenJDK on Conda Forge
doesn’t support it. Win64 is recommended. But if you install a JDK
on your own, it should work.
Yes, please sign up on our email
list
or follow us on Twitter.
Who is responsible for BeakerX?
It is developed by Two Sigma Open
Source. Yes we are
hiring.
Tutorials and Examples
Most of the documentation consists of
notebooks
that show BeakerX’s kernels and widgets in action.
Cheatsheet
Here is a cheatsheet
for a quick overview of BeakerX functionalities.
Installation with Conda
We recommend conda to install
Jupyter and BeakerX, and to manage your Python environments. BeakerX
works with Python 3.4 and above. Conda forge hosts the lastest
version.
conda create -y -n beakerx 'python>=3'
source activate beakerx
conda config --env --add pinned_packages 'openjdk>8.0.121'
conda install -y -c conda-forge ipywidgets beakerx
Installation for Jupyter Lab
You can try it as follows. Note that installing Lab extensions
requires
npm.
conda create -y -n labx 'python>=3'
source activate labx
conda config --env --add pinned_packages 'openjdk>8.0.121'
conda install -y -c conda-forge jupyterlab beakerx
jupyter labextension install @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager
jupyter labextension install beakerx-jupyterlab
Upgrading
If you have an environment with a previous version of BeakerX, to
upgrade to the latest version use:
conda update -c conda-forge beakerx
Running BeakerX
Start it with
or just
and then use the “New” menu to create a notebook in the language of your choice.
Installation with Pip
You can also install BeakerX with pip.
pip install beakerx
beakerx install
Uninstallation with Pip
beakerx uninstall
pip uninstall beakerx
Running with Docker
Docker is the most reliable way get and run Jupyter and BeakerX since it’s completely self contained.
docker run -p 8888:8888 beakerx/beakerx
Beaker Notebooks Converter
You can convert classic Beaker Notebook files (with file suffix
“.bkr”) to Jupyter Notebooks (with file suffix “.ipynb”) as follows:
Building and Contributing
We welcome developers to extend and improve BeakerX in ways that can
benefit everyone. Please see the
README and
CONTRIBUTING
files for more information.
