Introducing web-based notebooks

We have worked with the Spark shell and applications in previous chapters. The shell provides great features, such as trying out code quickly and checking results interactively. However, when code becomes larger, it is difficult to edit some lines and re-execute the code. This is where applications are useful in which the entire script is saved in a file and submitted. However, in this way, you lose powerful Read, Evaluate, Print, and Loop (REPL) features of the shell. Notebooks solve this problem by providing features of both the shell and application in a web browser.

Web-based notebooks are files that contain the input code and output such as results and graphs from an interactive session. They also contain additional information, such as documentation, mathematical expressions, and media related to an interactive session. They are stored in the JSON format and can be shared with anybody across the organization or externally. It is easy to view the existing...