Description
This is an attempt at writing a single coherent paragraph that helps a developer contextualize where ipywidgets sits inside of the jupyter ecosystem. This would have been incredibly helpful for me when starting to develop on top of jupyter. I'm not sure where this should live.
ipywidgets is part of the Jupyter Widgets subproject. ipywidgets are interactive HTML widgets for Jupyter notebooks and the IPython kernel. Notebooks come alive when interactive widgets are used. Users gain control of their data and can visualize changes in the data.
ipywidgets provides the core comms mechanism and simple interactive building blocks (Button, slider, input box) for quick interactive applications to be built entirely with python and jupyter.
(some sentence about the guardrails of ipywidgets, why wouldn't you expect bqplot or bokeh to be part of ipywidgets)
ipywidgets can be extended with customJS ...
ipywidgets are related to but separate from Jupyter Widgets. ipywidgets work only on the cell output/comms model. as of release 7, ipywidgets are built on top of the jupyter widgets js packaging system. Jupyter Widgets use this to build the entire jupyterlab environment from separate components.
ipywidgets are frequently used with traitlets to have a callback method of updating properties reactively.
There are a couple of further related projects that become useful when developing a packaged widget. (Widget-ts-cookiecutter)[https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/widget-ts-cookiecutter] is a highly opionated way of starting an ipywidgets package. Further Jupyter Hatch is used when building a widget.
Finally at the JS level, there are multiple widget backends including backbone, html, and yjs ???