Wrattler API documentation

Wrattler is a browser-based polyglot notebook system that is flexible and extensible. You can add support for new programming languages. Thanks to the fact that Wrattler does much of its processing directly in the web browser, you can create language plugins that run fully in the browser and create custom user interface as part of Wrattler notebooks. Furthermore, Wrattler can also be instantiated and used as part of a web page containing other content. This API documentation describes the most important types that you need if you want to extend or use Wrattler.

Wrattler notebook

The Main module contains types that you need to create new instances of Wrattler notebooks in browser using JavaScript, get notified when the contents of such notebooks change and also configure the languages that are available in the notebook.

Language plugins

The Languages module defines interfaces that you need to implement if you want to add support for a new programming language. To do this, you need to implement an interface that can parse code, construct dependency graph for the code and evaluate nodes in such dependency graph.

Dependency graph

The Graph module module contains interfaces and types that you'll need to work with dependency graphs. Each language plugin will typically need to define one or more types of nodes that it uses internally, but Wrattler also has some known types of nodes that are used, e.g. to indicate what variables are exported from a cell and can be used in subsequent cells.

Evaluation and values

The Values module module contains interfaces and types that you'll need need to evaluate code. In Wrattler, all evaluated results are linked with the dependency graph, meaning that they are invalidated when the code chages. Each language plugin can define its own custom types of values to use internally, but it can also use some standard Wrattler value types, for example to represent data frames, figures or console outputs.

Editor helpers

The Editor module module exposes two reusable user interface elements that you can use when creating the user interface for a custom language plugin. The first is a function to create a text editor based on the Monaco editor and the second one lets you create tabs that display previews for all the exports of a code block.