Scala Notebook: A REPL with Interactive Visualization

Ken Vogel's talk at the nescala unconference (https://www.meetup.com/nescala/events/97310532/) was such an stunner we invited him (okay, begged him) to give it again at ny-scala. We think Scala Notebook is going to change the way that Scala is learned, experimented with, and in some cases applied. If everything goes according to plan, you'll be able to use Scala Notebook by the time we meet. Here's Ken's description:

At Bridgewater (an investment management firm), we've started using Scala for modeling and analytics, and found it hard to do rich data exploration like you can do in MATLAB. So, we built and are open sourcing Scala Notebook (https://github.com/Bridgewater/scala-notebook#readme) — an interactive Web-based Scala evaluator.

Based on iPython Notebook, it lets you evaluate Scala expressions as with a REPL, but also supports rich HTML, graphics and persistent documents. It even offers two-way interactivity by connecting an FRP to Knockout JS. We'll demo the product, talk a bit about how it's built and how we're planning to evolve it on github.