Hi
We love zeppelin and the ease with which we can use it, however building
applications on top of zeppelin poses a few issues as we are unable to
leverage our UI skills as we have to stay within the boundaries of
zeppelin.
We looked at helium, but we thought it still has the same problems, an
alternate solution which has yielded us good benefits it to use zeppelin
notebook and server as backend and write the UI outside zeppelin. We then
use the paragraph and other apis to run the queries and show results in our
custom UI. This allows the UI to incorporate styles, themes and
visualizations which are more apt to the client needs and still use
zeppelin for the actual data crunching.
tldr version
The steps that we follow are:
1. Build a custom UI
2. Code the actual processing logic in zeppelin and expose this as
notebook, for each of the relevant paragraphs take the paragraph id
3. UI calls the paragraph and job api to submit queries and retrieve the
results, the apis we mostly use are
run the relevant code with /api/notebook/job/{notebookId}/{paragraphId}
retrieve the results with
/api/notebook/{notebookId}/paragraph/{paragraphId} and parse the result.msg
object and display it in UI
4. We made some changes to get the paragraph id in the UI easier
5. We made some changes to return more than just status ok from job api, we
return a id with which the job status and results can be tracked which is
useful in our async responses.
We can submit all these changes as a patch if the group feels it can be of
value.
Thanks
Apurba
