Pyabel webapp

[DanHickstein]

I've recently become aware that it's possible to run Python in the browser thanks to Pyodide. Using this approach, Claude made us this cool proof-of-principle PyAbel webapp:
https://danhickstein.github.io/pyabel-web/

I think an in-browser Abel transform tool could help make PyAbel more accessible to new users. What do you think @MikhailRyazanov and @stggh?

[MikhailRyazanov]

Looks interesting. :–)

Doesn’t seem to be usable as is (cannot load it’s own exported CSV; exports PNG with the frame, loads it upside-down and who knows how the colors are interpreted), but with hopefully small modifications could be a nice toy.

Where the source code is hosted?

[stggh]

I think our own @rth is an author/heavily involved with pyodide. I agree with "could be a nice toy".

[DanHickstein]

The source code is here: https://github.com/DanHickstein/pyabel-web?

It runs client side, so that's the cool part (thanks Pyodide!). So, we don't need to provide any computing power on the server. We can just host is straight off the GitHub pages thing, as it is now.

What you see is Claude's first attempt. I told him: "I want a PyAbel GUI on a webpage using Pyodide." and this is what he came up with in about 2 minutes. So, fixing the issues with saving/loading images should be pretty quick :). We'll play with it more tonight and see if we can address the problems.

[rth]

Happy that you are playing that with pyodide :)

I told him

On one side it's pretty impressive that it can do something working from a quick phrase on the other some of the engineering choices it came up with without more guidance are not ideal. Like manually bundling the source code in a abel_source.json. The normal way to do this would be to enable cibuildwheel to build a pyodide compatible wheel in CI but it is more work (or at least use pure python wheels if simpler) and let it use those.

But anyway as a demo it's nice!

[DanHickstein]

Good to hear from you @rth! We've definitely been enjoying using pyodide at our company, Octave Photonics. Check out these fun tools that we've made recently:
https://www.octavephotonics.com/nlse
https://glowup.octavephotonics.com/

I made a revised version of the pyabel-web example using a wheel and incorporating zoomable plots. Also has a better centering interface.

https://danhickstein.github.io/pyabel-web/