The advantage of LightTable's approach is that using HTML, is a simple, trivially extensible and powerful way to provide advanced UI widgeting, something modern emacs supports very poorly. Mostly due to working in a terminal if needed, but I think it holds it back a bit. The closest thing we have in emacs is pixmap support, which is poor, and painful to use!
Though, is LightTable the best/easiest way to get that? I don't know, it may be easier to render emacs buffers into a webkit view, it may also not be.
> Though, is LightTable the best/easiest way to get that? I don't know, it may be easier to render emacs buffers into a webkit view, it may also not be.
That is what I meant with "connect to browser instances" (swank-js already allows that, among others).
Basically when you need more advanced rendering, or browser environment when it is your target (browser based games and whatnot), this could be good enough and you can leverage a huge ecosystem for all the rest.
Sure, it could be good enough, but the ecosystem has not been building up around that. Perhaps it's the seperate languages used, or the clunkiness of having to use another browser and all the setup just to render a simple graph. But I personally have not found an extension that takes advantage of that.
Though, is LightTable the best/easiest way to get that? I don't know, it may be easier to render emacs buffers into a webkit view, it may also not be.