After looking at https://starboard.gg/about things are clearer now. The use-cases are clear and I can see the audience it targets.
I'm looking at this and comparing it to the situation I find myself in with looking for a syslog collector. I want something that can collect all my syslog and present them in a web UI in a sensible way.
My options appear to be limited to commercial solutions, ELK (Elastic, Logsearch, Kibana), or text files. There's no middle ground. I have ~20 VMs + containers, and no way to view all of their logs in a central sensible manner unless I roll my own (or buy more hardware to be able to run the ELK cluster).
I feel like I must be missing something here; you want to aggregate your syslog data; you have a bunch of files and a web browser.
Now what?
You beat your keyboard against the monitor while your browser sandbox steadfastly refuses to load your local file system files? [1]
You write your own server that serves data and the open source core? [2]
Yay, you now have the dubious honour of having re-invented jupyter notebooks, only, you had to roll it yourself, and it's insecure and really not very good compared to an existing mature product.
What can you actually do with this, that you can't do by right clicking on your browser window and picking 'inspect', and then clicking on 'console'?
You can certainly make interactive blog posts; absolutely, I 100% acknowledge that as a blog plugin, when you have already got a server to host your content, this would be pretty awesome.
If you do want to run your own databricks / notebook SAS, then I also see it as being a really great kickstart for you, absolutely.
However, out of the box? I'm... like, I think this is interesting, but I don't see how I could actually use it.
[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50007055/fetch-request-t...
As for interacting with local files: I imagine a CLI tool that spawns a webserver that will serve local notebook files and perhaps the files in folders you point it at. Or: you generate a notebook file with the data baked into it (as a JSON blob or something).
As for security: I think the browser sandbox is a lot more safe than running Python (Jupyter) with a lot of dependencies you will have to verify.
And finally: you need to be able to get the data into the browser. For a company the most 'scalable' would probably be self-hosting Starboard and (setting up CORS to) allow reading from various datasources from your internal network, or otherwise authenticating the requests from notebooks.
Another thing that has worked well for me in the past with other web tools: support drag and drop. You drop in the file you want to visualize.
In the end Starboard notebook is a tool for creating a small website that you can instantly share, without needing a backing Python server always on, and without the need of any build tooling (webpack, what have you). It's good for small web tools, articles and tutorials. I hope this makes it a little bit more clear!
The ability to basically drag and drop a file (eg. csv) onto the notebook to vendor it as part of the static notebook that other people could then access would be the bridge that I was looking for and couldn't find.