[HN Gopher] Show HN: Datapane - A new way to build reports, dash...
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Show HN: Datapane - A new way to build reports, dashboards, and
apps in Python
Hello HN! We're Leo and Mandeep, founders of Datapane
(https://datapane.com). We're building a way to create reports,
dashboards, and web apps from your existing data using Python.
Think of it as a combination of React and htmx, specifically
designed for the Python data stack. Our GitHub is
https://github.com/datapane/datapane and you can try building a
report or app in ~2 minutes on Codespaces: https://try.datapane.com
We started building Datapane at our previous start-up, where we
struggled to deliver ML model results to clients. Much to our
surprise, the data science took less time than repeatedly creating
reports by copying and pasting plots into PowerPoint decks. It
seemed absurd that we had to switch to PowerPoint or legacy BI
tools like Tableau to share, and our initial goal was to
programmatically generate reports using the datasets and plots we
had in Python. To enable this, we started hacking on a Python-based
UI framework for constructing HTML views from data-centric blocks -
like plots, data tables, and layout components. You can export
these to standalone HTML files, or host them as a web app on
somewhere like GitHub Pages or Fly.io. We recently also added the
ability to connect Python functions to forms and front-end events
so you can build web apps which run backend code. We handle the
entire network and RPC layer, so you only need to write plain
Python functions that take parameters and return other blocks. You
can check out an example of the code to create a simple app:
https://github.com/datapane/examples/blob/main/apps/iris-plo...
Datapane's philosophy is pretty different from other products in
the space. We wanted to keep things simple, but avoid the footguns
our users faced with frameworks like Streamlit, where the
reactive/network-aware model was hard to move beyond an MVP or POC.
For backend interactivity, we believe the original web got a lot
right, and unlike reactive models which rely on websockets,
Datapane is unashamedly request/response. This takes inspiration
from HTTP and our own experiences with htmx, which offers an
elegant way to add interactivity to HTML. Under the hood, we
actually compile down to a (gasp!) XML-based hypermedia format,
akin to HTML, but tailored specifically for constructing data UIs.
The result is that not every change in your app requires a server
round trip, as much of it can be pre rendered and most
interactivity happens on the client-side. In addition to improving
performance, this also makes running in production become 10x
simpler. This separation between the view and backend compute also
makes Datapane modular. If our app server isn't a good fit for your
use-case, serve Datapane views from the web-framework of your
choice (we've been hacking on serving views from Django). Want to
compute blocks from inside Airflow or generate them on a schedule
or from a webhook? Computation can happen out of band of the UI.
You can even build and host apps from inside of Jupyter, where you
can preview blocks live and convert notebook cells to blocks in
your view. We currently offer a hosting platform on
https://datapane.com for sharing reports publicly (free) or with
your team (paid), and will be adding serverless app hosting support
to it in the next few weeks. Our ultimate goal is to create an
open-source toolkit for building data products across the entire
stack - from reports, to dashboards, to full-stack apps - all using
100% Python. You can see a few we've built already in our gallery:
https://datapane.com/gallery We'd love to hear your feedback.
Thanks!
Author : pea
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-03-23 13:50 UTC (9 hours ago)
| greazy wrote:
| Very cool. Why are you using a neon purple theme for the plots
| and your web page ? I ask because that color scheme seems to be
| popping up everywhere.
| pea wrote:
| Thanks! We are big users of TailwindCSS across the product and
| those colours are from their palette:
| https://tailwindcss.com/docs/customizing-colors
| mdaniel wrote:
| the fact there are so many different steps in
| https://github.com/datapane/datapane#analytics signals that you
| may want to adopt https://consoledonottrack.com/
| pea wrote:
| Thanks so much for sharing this, I hadn't seen that before.
| We'll get on implementing it.
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