[HN Gopher] Apache Zeppelin
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       Apache Zeppelin
        
       Author : saikatsg
       Score  : 79 points
       Date   : 2024-09-03 06:29 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (zeppelin.apache.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (zeppelin.apache.org)
        
       | Woshiwuja wrote:
       | What is its use case? Looks like a jupiter-ish thing
        
         | drtournier wrote:
         | I was an user of zeppelin for a couple of years (v0.7-0.8), we
         | used it to run Scala Spark and the UI has a lot of bells and
         | whistles to make it easier to use Spark, display spark
         | dataframes and simple dataviz features out-of-the-box. It is a
         | bit relatable to the notebook experience you would have in
         | databricks.
        
         | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
         | I certainly felt like the use case of interacting directly with
         | spark (through scala) and very low friction visualizations was
         | quite nice. Not that it's hard to get that with jupyter, but
         | batteries included, just click through the UI visualization was
         | better for zeppelin
        
       | KronisLV wrote:
       | It's cool to stumble upon Apache projects every now and then.
       | 
       | Not all of them get that much love, but often they have pretty
       | nice functionality.
       | 
       | I still remember that setting up Apache Skywalking was one of the
       | easier ways of getting some APM and tracing in place, compared to
       | the other options out there.
       | 
       | And, of course, the likes of Apache2 and Apache Tomcat are also
       | quite useful in some circumstances.
        
         | latchkey wrote:
         | As one of the people who got Sun to open source what became
         | Apache Tomcat, much appreciated to hear that. =)
        
           | elric wrote:
           | Even after all these years, Tomcat is still incredibly solid,
           | so thanks for that :-)
           | 
           | Sometimes I do worry about the long term survival of the ASF.
           | Many projects are largely supported by 1 person. A lot of
           | projects are mostly abandoned (but not yet moved to the
           | attic). Many others suffer from the blight of "what the hell
           | is this for?", where their website is so vague that it might
           | as well not exist.
        
           | Tostino wrote:
           | Thanks for that. Ran my first SaaS on Tomcat.
        
           | taude wrote:
           | Thanks for that. We used Tomcat as our app server at my last
           | company from 2008 until I left in 2019. I'm guessing it's
           | still be used....
        
         | jugg1es wrote:
         | Shout out to Apache Nifi
        
       | forgetfulness wrote:
       | Mean of me to say, but you're just better off using Jupyter as a
       | local notebook sandbox, for one, the relevant development Docker
       | image does bundle Spark[1], making it more convenient to fire up,
       | and more importantly, it's used way more than Zeppelin, as orgs
       | not using Jupyter are probably using Databricks notebooks
       | instead, and it's split between those two.
       | 
       | Zeppelin does make it easier to run Scala Spark, I find, but
       | Scala Spark usage has declined rapidly.
       | 
       | 1. https://hub.docker.com/r/jupyter/pyspark-notebook
        
         | Moto7451 wrote:
         | I worked at a non Databricks using organization and sharing
         | Jupyter notebooks hosted on Kubernetes ended up being such a
         | difficult endeavor that an ops team was hired for it. I don't
         | think we really got positive ROI on this but some people felt
         | really cool (we had too much of a bias towards self hosting).
         | We did need some sort of sharing and collaboration mechanism
         | and at least for that job this checks a lot of the boxes,
         | especially since our Spark SQL jobs couldn't be visualized in
         | Jupyter while I worked there.
        
         | appplication wrote:
         | We have found Zeppelin to largely be frustrating, bug riddled,
         | and overly restrictive for normal notebook use cases.
         | 
         | I agree that Jupyter for PySpark makes more sense in almost
         | every use case. We made the switch as an org about 2 years ago
         | and haven't looked back. Jupyter has its own issues but does
         | feel much usable by just about every metric.
        
       | benzible wrote:
       | Obligatory mention of Livebook: https://livebook.dev/
        
       | iconara wrote:
       | The big difference between Zeppelin and Jupyter is how you can
       | easily build interactive notebooks with input fields, checkboxes,
       | selects, etc. This is much closer to what I thought notebooks
       | were going to evolve into back when I saw them the first time;
       | Hypercard for the data engineer. Observable has kind of delivered
       | that, but on the frontend. Jupyter seems to me to have gone down
       | the path of code editor with cells, and Zeppelin unfortunately
       | never got any traction.
        
         | alexott wrote:
         | Another nice feature was data exchange between different
         | kernels
        
         | jjtheblunt wrote:
         | I don't understand if you're saying that Zeppelin or Jupyter is
         | easier for input fields, checkboxes, etc., though it reminds me
         | either way of Mathematica (going strong since 1988 too!).
        
       | alexott wrote:
       | Unfortunately, it didn't get enough community around, and
       | development has stalled. For some time it was sponsored by
       | Alibaba, but at some point of time, the main maintainer left it.
       | Similar story with other people
       | 
       | P.S. I was committer there until changed job.
        
       | rad_gruchalski wrote:
       | Good old Apache Zeppelin. It's almost a decade since I last
       | worked with Zeppelin and Spark Notebook at Technicolor Virdata.
       | Shout out to Eric from Datalayer.
        
       | hocuspocus wrote:
       | If you're looking for more modern notebooks supporting Scala (and
       | Spark):
       | 
       | - https://almond.sh
       | 
       | - https://polynote.org
       | 
       | Toree is mostly dead but might also get a Scala 2.13 release now
       | that Spark 4.0 is approaching.
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-05 23:01 UTC)