[WIP] Enormous rework of (mostly frontend) code.

.gitignore

@@ -4,4 +4,5 @@ yarn.lock
 node_modules
 *.pyc
 deps/build.log
-
+*.ipynb_checkpoints
+*.js.map

packages/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+# WebIO Frontend
+
+These packages contain all the necessary frontend code required for WebIO.
+
+## Directory Structure
+The various WebIO providers are set up as a monorepo -- multiple packages
+exist within a single repository -- via lerna.
+The core code is contained in the `webio/` directory.
+The `*-provider/` directories contain the code necessary to setup WebIO
+in that provider's environment (e.g. Mux or Jupyter).
+
+## Development Environment
+Ensure npm is installed on your machine.
+From this directory, run `npm install`.
+This should install all necessary dependencies in `node_modules/` as well
+as bootstrap the monorepo (so that the core webio package is symlinked
+within all of the provider packages' own `node_modules/`).
+
+## Building
+If code for a single provider is changed, you can run `npm run build` from
+the root directory of that provider. To build the code for all providers,
+run `npm run build` from this directory (which will recursively call
+`npm run build` within all the provider directories).
+
+## Publishing
+**todo: how to publish to npm**