Observable Notebooks Data Loaders
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The Observable Notebooks team released Data Loaders, a new feature, but the community is divided on its usefulness and the direction of the technology, with some questioning its platform support and comparisons to other notebook technologies.
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Sep 10, 2025 at 1:04 PM EDT
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[0]: https://github.com/observablehq/framework/discussions/2022
[0]: https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/kit) [1]: https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/desktop
Isn't the idea to write notes? I think constantly running a script to generate a static webpage would drive me insane. Isn't the whole point of a computational notebook to have some kind of integrated GUI?
if you must know, the product i work on is primarily a data lake. we have our own query language -> i have a fork of the CLI w added support for parsing custom cells. i don't know of any alternatives that give me a notebook so easily!
> running a script to generate a static webpage would drive me insane
possibly web-brained take but i don't mind it much. builds are instant for me, network latency is the only thing i find myself waiting around on.
> Isn't the whole point of a computational notebook to have some kind of integrated GUI
well yea, pretty sure the entire point of the desktop app is to show what you can build atop the new api! this preview is meant to expand the capability of observable within your own custom web app. the original framework was too close to some of the frustrations you mentioned, so they're trying to make it more amorphous :)
[0] https://github.com/observablehq/notebook-kit/tree/main/src/r...
A ton more programs, especially one-shot programs that operate on a single batch input (e.g. a directory of files) and then generate some output—like a ZIP copy of the files for your static site—should offer this but unfortunately don't. At best they'll put out an Electron app for cross-platform compatibility, but it doesn't sidestep the problem of granting overbroad capabilities to NPM modules (or the massive memory footprint). Then, in this case, there's Observable Desktop, which as a Mac-only app, falls short even of that mark.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229684>
In theory sounds good, I like the demos, but never actually saw anyone actually using it.
We use Marimo notebooks as a great improvement over Jupyter.
I think that in all the notebook solutions I've seen that allow this, a culture emerges where the "final result" is put at the top so that you can find it easily and interact with it as a user. The actual development process involves writing stuff top down and then re-ordering it for use.
Doing data analysis in javascript feels a bit weird at first, but it allows you to write a bit more functional code than python which I ended up liking.
I dislike the plotting api but the pro of being automatically updated without me needing to do/host anything is cool.
Not saying it is better or worse than Jupyter etc. Just that it has been exciting to think I can make viz that would not look out of place in major pubs, etc.