Some years ago I tried (and admittedly failed) to do something similar (a Jupyter notebook as an app) when trying to build a domain specific application for wat

Some years ago I tried (and admittedly failed) to do something similar (a Jupyter notebook as an app) when trying to build a domain specific application for water resource management - we ended up building a "classic" web application via Leaflet and Python at the backend. The idea is intriguing, however it is non trivial to pass information from JS to Python and vice versa. You can do that, but it messes with Jupyter's event system and breaks the usual notebook workflow. Maybe this has changed for the better, but at that time this stuff (IPython widgets I think) was heavily in flux.