ipywidgets 6.0.0 support

[akhmerov]

It appears the dashboards server doesn't support ipywidgets 6.0.0 due to backwards-incompatible changes.

[philippjfr]

Can confirm when I try it I'm seeing a lot of Couldn't create a model messages on the console. @akhmerov Is that what you were seeing?

[akhmerov]

Yep, exactly.

[aiguofer]

Experiencing this as well. Has anyone found any workarounds for now?

[parente]

There's probably a good amount of work needed to get dashboard server up to snuff with the latest ipywidgets and the JupyterLab components used under the covers. I don't forsee myself, at least, having cycles to focus on the work any time soon.

[rserbitar]

So what's the plan here? Is dashboards server going to be abandoned? How much work are we looking at?

[parente]

So what's the plan here?

I opened #319 to document the status of all the dashboard work and start a discussion about what's next.

As for the work required to bring the jupyterlab and ipywidget components up to date, it's hard to say off hand. In the past, it took quite a bit of effort to stay in sync with the API changes between jupyterlab releases and ipywidgets releases. Maybe the breaking changes have slowed down, but I don't expect so. JupyterLab is still an alpha-level project and the dashboard server is re-using those components in ways beyond the original design. Similarly, ipywidgets is changing to both support running in the classic and JupyterLab notebook server as well as to enable use on plain HTML pages.