JuliaBox is shutting down

[abelsiqueira]

Hi everyone, we were translating the book to Portuguese (here) and noticed that JuliaBox is shutting down and that it affects the English book as well. Do you guys have any plans related to this change?

[BenLauwens]

I have not yet found a solution that solves all use cases:

• Julia Pro? some license issues
• Julia + Atom? installation can be tricky
• Julia + IJulia? installation can also be tricky
• virtual disk with Linux + Julia + IJulia? VirtualBox or another virtualization soft has to be installed with its own problems...
• alternatives to JuliaBox? not yet looked

So if you have a recommendation, please share;)
Kind regards

Ben

[abelsiqueira]

Looks like Repl.it is a good alternative for basic usage. I haven't found others. It has a basic IDE and REPL, and it's what the official site is using for try julia.

I would argue that the book should also present the basic REPL as a viable option since it involves just some basic installation without much configuring. On OSX and Linux I have a script so that using curl ... is sufficient. We also point to the "Editors and IDE" section of the julialang.org page. I'm not sure what's the first instance that the editor is needed in the book.

[BenLauwens]

Repl.it sounds like a good solution. Can we plot to an embedded window (a kind of plot pane)?
I have just tested my package NativeSVG that I will use to replace the turtle commands from Luxor and I get an error.

Presenting the basic REPL is needed but using it as a default for newcomers can be tough (MS Windows ...)

[abelsiqueira]

Not sure, never used it before. It failed for a simple using Plots, and it's still using Julia 1.3, so probably the support is not great.

Do you say it's tough because it is not attractive, tough to work on, or tough to install?

[chrisvwx]

One thing that JuliaBox provided was Jupyter notebooks. The Jupyter site has a try page with a link to a mybinder.org page that starts a Jupyter notebook running a Julia tutorial. It doesn't always start for me, perhaps because they are trying to prevent abuse of the page. At any rate, mybinder does seem like one very good option for Jupyter notebooks. It seems possible to convert each chapter into a Jupyter notebook (maybe the entire book?) that students could go to directly.

NextJournal is appealing, though it has a proprietary file format.