The developers for very long yearned for a collection of plugins that could communicate with one another. That’s how JupyterLab, was built as a plugin-powered framework, a new product formed as a result of re-work of Jupyter.
Project Jupyter provides building blocks for interactive and exploratory computing that make data science reproducible across over 40 programming languages (Python, Julia, R, etc.). The fundamental idea of JupyterLab is to offer a a computational environment that allows users to assemble these building blocks in different ways to support interactive workflows that include, but go far beyond, Jupyter Notebooks.
The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text, used for numerical simulation, statistical modelling, machine learning, data cleaning, transformation, and much more. Read more.
Powered by PhosphorJS framework, JupyterLab uses a web-based UI that’s similar to the tab-and-panel interface used in IDEs like Visual Studio or Eclipse. JupyterLab empowers what it describes as “multiple workflow needs,” where a user can “move from a narrative focus to a scripted one” when needed.
JupyterLab is not suitable for general usage yet. When JupyterLab hits a proper 1.0 release, it will start showing up in cloud environments as a front end for number-crunching platforms. Read more.