ipwidgets can quietly fail if wrapped in an hvPlot component

Description of expected behavior and the observed behavior

ipwidgets can quietly fail if wrapped in an hvPlot component. There should be some error/warning.

The issue seems to occur if you install JupyterLab in a different environment than the IPython kernel that is being used to run a notebook. The ipywidgets docs have a fix for this (See also this issue).

users should be warned in some way if the ipywidgets are not working. Ideally, there would be a warnings about this issue in the hvplot documentation as well as inline in a notebook when the issue occurs.

Complete, minimal, self-contained example code that reproduces the issue

Here is a section extracted from the hvplot user guide / interactive.ipynb. It produces no output as seen in the screenshot underneath the code

import ipywidgets as ipw
import hvplot.xarray # noqa
import xarray as xr

ds = xr.tutorial.load_dataset('air_temperature')
slider = ipw.IntSlider(description='time', min=0, max=10)
ds.air.interactive(width=800).isel(time=slider)

Stack traceback and/or browser JavaScript console output

You can see the error if you simply try to render the ipywidget

import ipywidgets as ipw
slider = ipw.IntSlider(min=0, max=10)
slider

Error displaying widget: model not found

holoviz / hvplot