Online Scientific Python: Wakari
If you like Python, want to analyze data online, and are interested in a standardized environment that can be easily shared, read on:
Continuum Analytics is offering a new beta: Wakari. You can register to try it out!
If you’re an academic frustrated by setting up computing environments and annoyed that your colleagues can’t easily run your code, Wakari is made for you. Wakari handles all of the problems related to setting up a Python scientific computing environment. Because Wakari builds on Anaconda, useful libraries like SciKit, mpi4py and NumPy are right at your fingertips without compilation gymnastics.
Since you run code on our servers through a web browser, it is easy for your colleagues to re-run your code to repeat your analysis, or try out variations on their own. At Continuum, we understand that reproducibility is an important part of the scientific process that your results be consistent for reviewers and colleagues.
Supports chrome, safari and firefox.
Can’t use IE, the most dominant browser.
Workplace requirements prohibit use from using anything but IE. So much for wakari.
That’s a little unfair Patrick. Wakari depends on modern web technology, such as websockets, that IE doesn’t support. Much of the technology Wakari is built from depends on the user having a modern browser. It just wouldn’t work otherwise.
If your workplace refuses to use modern technology, you should complain to them. Even if IE were as dominant as you say it is, that doesn’t mean that the Web itself should be developed according to Microsoft.
Microsoft make a poor browser that lacks a lot of core features that are standard everywhere else. Microsoft are working hard to catch up, but haven’t. So, for now, IE users have no access to a lot of web applications, and get served a degraded, fall-back edition whenever they visit modern sites which IE can’t handle. Wakari would not function at all if it was degraded enough to run in IE, so graceful degradation is not an option like it is when developing simple websites.
Just for the record, the IPython Notebook does not work in IE, and the developers have no intention of trying to fix IE with nasty workarounds. IE will eventually catch up or else it’ll just fade away further. No big deal.
I think IE10 will support websockets, so you’d be able to use a lot of these types of applications with IE10, but something tells me your workplace will take a while to upgrade.
Besides, IE isn’t dominate in Wakari’s market. Wakari is not aimed at some old granny, running XP on dial up. It’s aimed at people who write code professionally. These people generally have modern browsers.