thebe was originally written with jquery and aimed primarily at use in static webpages or websites using a minimal amount of javascript. thebe is part of the Executable Books project, and can be used in Jupyter Books via the sphinx-thebe plugin.
Prior to the thebe-core refactor, thebe was a small but powerful library for connecting any front end to a jupyter compute service.
However, it was jquery centric and focussed on making a web page containing static code elements "live" in an opinionated way -- with little scope for configuration or interaction with the resources once initialized and error handling.
The purpose of thebe-core is to isolate and expand the core functionality in thebe so that it could be used in different ways in a wider range of web contexts, from simple html pages through to web applications using frameworks like React or Next.js, whilst still being used internally in thebe providing a like-for-like behaviour there.
Refactoring the thebe like this, allows interesting enhancements to be made including connecting to a juptyerlite kernel and providing a simplified runtime interface for interacting with Jupyter servers and sessions.
