[Bf-committers] [GSOC17][Proposal] Jupyter Kernel addon for Blender

[Andreas Klostermann]

As a starter this documentation may help:
http://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/development/index.html

I'm not involved in Blender development, so you shouldn't take my views as
anything official. But my opinion is that a Jupyter integration for Blender
would be useful for users who write Python addons, but don't want to
compile the sources themselves. Using Blender as a Python module would
require compilation. Implementing the kernel protocol through asyncio would
mean it can be run from any blender binary distribution. The Jupyter
notebook server would then have a kernel config which starts Blender with a
script, this script installs asyncio and listens on the specified port.
Blender could be run with or without GUI.

Here is one implementation of such an asyncio based kernel:
https://github.com/takluyver/aiokernel/blob/master/aiokernel.py

The problem with that is the zeromq protocol implementations for asyncio.
The former code uses something called "zentedeschia", and there is also
aiomzmq and I think pyzmq has another one. But they all depend on pyzmq
which in turn requires compiled extensions. I haven't been able to load
pyzmq into Blender at all, so far. Other than this little import, there
should be nothing in the way of Jupyter/Blender integration.