Equivalent of the "Voila preview extension" for Voici

[jsignell]

Problem

I have now spent some time developing a voici dashboard and my process looks like:

1. build the notebook for jupyterlite
2. open jupyterlite in a new private window to avoid any previous state
3. make changes and run notebook to make sure things are working
4. download the notebook
5. build the notebook for voici
6. check that things look right
7. push the changes to github

Proposed Solution

It would be great to use the voila extension in jupyterlite to render voici.

Additional context

This might be related to #19

[martinRenou]

Thank you for opening an issue.

Do you mean you are requesting being able to use the voila preview extension inside the JupyterLite lab UI?

[jsignell]

Do you mean you are requesting being able to use the voila preview extension inside the JupyterLite lab UI?

Yes that is exactly right, but I am also open to other suggestions. There might already be a better pattern than the one I described.

[martinRenou]

Unfortunately this will be tricky to implement as of today.

Currently, Voici works by pre-rendering the dashboard template prior to serving the webpage.

In order to implement the preview extension (and some equivalent of the voila server extension), we would need Voici to render the template on the fly in the webpage. So we would need to either run Jinja/nbconvert in WASM Python, or we would need to implement a lighter equivalent (https://github.com/mitsuhiko/minijinja compiled to WASM?). We could mimick the server extension by having a worker lying around ready to render templates upon request.

I would love to see something like that happen.

[trungleduc]

Actually, we can make a new extension that works with the lab template, and to some extent, the gridstack template, without using Jinja

[martinRenou]

Indeed, that would be another step in the direction of not supporting the Jinja templates and nbconvert... Still don't know how I feel about this.