Pluto Support and Integration

[TheCedarPrince]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please explain.

Currently, Javis does not work within a Pluto environment. One cannot use Javis to view frames of an animation easily like they could using the built-in Javis image viewer. Furthermore, on some platforms, the Javis image viewer is not performant due to it being built using Gtk.jl.

We could perhaps get around this performance issue as well by providing browser-based support built around using Pluto as a platform.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would love to build functionality into Javis Pluto notebook support by creating something like this:

Source: https://blog.dominodatalab.com/interactive-dashboards-in-jupyter/

But using Pluto instead. I think this functionality could be achieved by using PlutoUi.jl. Furthermore, this might be better suited to go into its own repository. So, initial development may take place on the main branch but later move to its own dedicated location.

Describe alternatives you've considered

The best alternative would be the Javis image viewer but since not all platforms best support GTK based GUIs, this would provide greater applicability of Javis. I am not certain how Pluto will take to what I am imagining being an image viewer; I imagine Jupyter may be more performant but I am not sure at this point. Only experimentation will tell!

[VarLad]

Any update on this?

[TheCedarPrince]

Hey @clad26 - thanks for the ping!

Currently, @Sov-trotter has attempted to look into this. However, it seems like the problem, based on the discussions here are more on Pluto side. We unfortunately do not have any control over this matter from our side.

Pinging @sov-trotter if he has anymore updates he could add.

[Sov-trotter]

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/43717431/112513984-ddd3a280-8dba-11eb-9288-74969ab9fb61.mp4

Not a pure integration, but something that we can add in the docs(tends to be buggy at times) Luxor does something similar here(http://juliagraphics.github.io/Luxor.jl/latest/examples/#Working-in-Pluto)

[TheCedarPrince]

That's fantastic @Sov-trotter ! Super curious on how you got this working - how did you hook into PlutoUI?

[Sov-trotter]

There are two methods to work this out:

• Rather than using the render function we can simply pass video and video.objects to the get_javis_frame method along with the slider iterator(using PlutoUI inside the Pluto notebook).
• To not use the internal get_javis_frame method, we can create a _pluto_viewer method which basically stores all the frames as:
  • Frames(png) in a temporary folder in the pluto_notebooks directory and the simply call those based on x
  • Array of the image matrix(in-memory) and then do something like

    a = render(video, liveview = true);
    a[x] #x is the slider value

[Sov-trotter]

So in anyway, the user will have to declare the Slider method via PlutoUI

[Sov-trotter]

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/43717431/112682054-93732400-8e95-11eb-9a7b-70928153457f.mp4

When liveview=false

[TheCedarPrince]

WOW!!! @Sov-trotter - I could work with you on a PR to document how to use Pluto with Javis. I could go ahead and open one and ping you if you have time.

[Sov-trotter]

Would love that Thanks! I was able to solve the above issue with in-memory interactive viewer. Will push the changes in a while

[Wikunia]

Looks lovely! Thanks @Sov-trotter Will have a look at the PRs on Sunday. Will probably merge the Jupyter one if @TheCedarPrince is okay with that.

[TheCedarPrince]

I'll comment about Jupyter on that issue/PR - will jump over there @Wikunia