nteract: An open-source, desktop-based, interactive computing application

Today, along with our partners at Plot.ly, we're announcing a significant investment in the open-source nteract project. nteract is a desktop-based, interactive computing application.

At Domino, we're huge fans of the Jupyter Notebook project. We use Jupyter extensively, from exploring sales, marketing, and operations data, to sharing analyses and visualizations with the team. The Domino data science platform removes the complexity of deploying notebook servers and managing multi-language notebook environments. As a result, a large number of our customers use Jupyter too.

For many use cases, Jupyter is not ideal. The browser-based client-server model does not easily lend itself to creating rich interactive computing applications that take advantage of native desktop integration and support offline use. With nteract, you can create documents, like the one below, that contain executable code, textual content, and images, and convey a computational narrative. Unlike Jupyter, your documents are stand-alone, cross-platform desktop applications, providing a seamless desktop experience and offline usage.

Ease of use makes nteract an ideal environment for deploying rich data applications to both business users and data scientists, researchers, and others with data science technology experience.

nteract can run your existing Jupyter notebooks without any modification, and supports multiple Jupyter kernels: Python, R, Julia, and JavaScript. Being a native Jupyter notebook, nteract applications can be easily saved to Domino, versioned, shared, and if needed, run on high-performance machines in the cloud, in your VPC, or on-premise.

This is the beginning of a journey for the nteract team and community contributors. Planned enhancements include real-time, multi-user collaboration, and the ability to connect to remote kernels (for example, using Domino's scalable compute).

Thanks to Kyle, Safia, and team for all the hard work they put into developing nteract. We're looking forward to partnering with you as you build on the great platform you've developed.

Visit the nteract project on GitHub if you'd like to try it out, learn more, or get involved in the project.