ypy-in-pyodide Quill demo

[kafonek]

I took a shot at recreating the yjs Quill example using y-py in a webworker with pyodide. Source code at https://github.com/kafonek/quill-demo. I recorded a short demo to share internally at Noteable, so some of the comments in the video are for that audience but here's yjs, server-side ypy, and pyodide-ypy in action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOlydiiWX0E

Some thoughts about the experience.

• Quill is neat, the delta structure is cool. I had been frustrated by not having a minimal "yjs bindings to a textarea" example but now I totally understand why minimal examples with frameworks like Quill are better
• I was happy with how much control I had in Python, from installing dependencies to using "native js websocket" with Python syntax to registering callbacks for messages coming in on websocket or webworker
• I wish I had access to the quill canvas object in my webworker. That would cut down on the complexity of writing message handlers on both sides of the webworker (index.html and worker.py)
• I see the point of origin argument in transactions now! Need to get that into yrs / y-py
• I think it makes sense to put the message serialization helper code (ypy-websockets.yutils) into yrs

There's lots of room to build on this current demo, and I want to explore codemirror bindings next since we use that framework. Hope everything works if you try it on your machine, let me know if you run into any bumps! Thanks.

[davidbrochart]

Quite impressive!
I'm wondering if your approach could be used in jupyterlite/jupyterlite#896. But I think we don't want to pay the cost of a Python interpreter just to enable collaboration.

• I think it makes sense to put the message serialization helper code (ypy-websockets.yutils) into yrs

You mean into ypy? Yes, I agree, since it's network-agnostic.

I want to explore codemirror bindings next since we use that framework

You should look at how it's done in JupyterLab.

[kafonek]

Thanks @davidbrochart. I actually wanted to tease this little demo at the Jupyterlab realtime community meeting this morning but I think that's another out of date/dead calendar item :( I'll read up on jupyterlab code. It'd be great to pair with someone experienced in that code base sometime. I agree that pyodide is too much of a cost right now. I hope things will change in the future.

I suggested putting the yutils helper methods in yrs so that they wouldn't have to be implemented in each language binding (ypy, ruby, etc) and I figure it would be more performant in Rust. That being said, I don't have enough experience to write it up in Rust and moving from ypy-websockets to y-py alone would be an incremental improvement imo.