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Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

observablehq.com

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Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#101

Post by a-ve »

one_buggy_boi wrote: post #99

What would be a good design pattern to put these dashboards behind auth? I suppose since they're static files you could just serve them with something like FastAPI or Spring Boot and have your CI/CD refresh the static files throughout the day on shared storage?

If you're putting these behind a reverse proxy (nginx, etc.) you can just setup client certificate authentication by using your own locally generated CA or by using something like Vault for UI-based certificate generation. When you visit this site with a certificate installed on your device, it will authenticate successfully, and for those who do not have a correct certificate installed, a "No certificate presented" error will be shown.

It's fairly easy to setup and there are multiple guides available for it. Here's one: https://fardog.io/blog/2017/12/30/client-side-certificate-au...

Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#102

Post by mbostock »

one_buggy_boi wrote: post #99

What would be a good design pattern to put these dashboards behind auth? I suppose since they're static files you could just serve them with something like FastAPI or Spring Boot and have your CI/CD refresh the static files throughout the day on shared storage?

For one, you can deploy them to Observable (with `observable deploy`) and we’ll provide access control.

Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#103

Post by mbostock »

ddanieltan wrote: post #95
mbostock wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re working on the interactivity, but we’re not going to do a Python wrapper as the goal of Observable Framework (and Plot) is to leverage web technologies with JavaScript in the front-end for interactive graphics — while doing whatever language you like, including Python, on the back-end for data analysis. There is a R wrapper for Observable Plot ( https://github.com/juba/obsplot ) and so I imagine someone could w…

FYI: Same dev building obsplot is also building a Python version at https://github.com/juba/pyobsplot

Ah, that’s what I thought at first, but I googled for “obsplot” and found the R one and thought I misremembered. Thank you for the correction.

Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#104

Post by skybrian »

tophtucker wrote: post #98
skybrian wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data loaders seem like an interesting way to define a multi-language build system without having to write a makefile. Lots of build systems do this, but the boundaries between build steps often isn't as clean and uniform as having a single output per build step and relying on a file naming convention. It's not truly reactive if you have to do a build to make anything happen. But maybe that doesn't matter, as long as…

Yeah there are some open issues about more granular rebuilds and chaining data loaders. https://github.com/observablehq/framework/issues/638 , https://github.com/observablehq/framework/issues/332 It’s kinda cool to think about the shearing layers of reactivity. Reactivity is what originally drew me to Observable. But the way notebooks have to be recomputed live for every viewer every time makes them feel silly for, l…

Another interesting example: since Go packages use minimum version selection, publishing a new version of a package doesn't do anything right away. Someone has to notice it (perhaps reading a release announcement) and bump the version number on a dependency. Then, after testing, they might release a new version, which again, doesn't do anything until projects downstream from them decide to upgrade.

That's deliberate, since they don't want packages to update their dependencies without testing them, and builds are supposed to be deterministic.

So it seems like for cross-project data dependencies, there's a tradeoff between deterministic results and getting the latest data? If one project depends on a JSON file from another project, and the JSON changes, when do you want or expect to see the change? There needs to be a version history for changes to the external JSON file to get a choice in the matter. (Perhaps it's cached locally.)

Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#105

Post by apitman »

mbostock wrote: post #37
ddanieltan wrote: post #19

I'm super excited to try this out! Couple of questions since I see @mbostock active in the comments. 1. Is the flexibility of languages used in data loaders/backend going to eventually come to the front end/ui? Or will the paradigm always be bring-your-own-language for the data loading but build your dashboard with observablejs/observable plot? 2. Considering ObservableJS is supported by Quarto, can we look forward t…

1. We don’t have immediate plans to bring other languages to the front-end — maybe TypeScript, but that’s just stripping annotations; maybe some WebAssembly. Our idea is to have a clear serializable “membrane” separating your back-end (in any language, running on build on your servers) from your front-end (in JavaScript, running on load in the client). Data loaders produce data during build, which gets handed-off to…

That's an interesting quote. What is the difference between charting and graphing in this context?

Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#106

Post by nextworddev »

j-pb wrote: post #73

If you play the history of Observable backwards you start with a company creating a static site generator for dashboards, which then struggles to find a market fit as it tries to bring datascience to middle management, to finally reach a focused, simple and elegant tool for exploratory programming, data visualisation, and interactive documentation in javascript.

Ok but is anyone paying for it?

Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#107

Post by farhanhubble »

I love how much is possible with the Observable framework and support for libraries like d3.js. However many data apps cannot precompute their outputs. For example, a pipeline that extracts text from documents based on what a user queries, cannot precompute the results and any visualizations must be updated every time. The best hack to accomplish this seems to be rebuilding the app on each update. Or is there another solution?

Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#108

Post by apitman »

one_buggy_boi wrote: post #99

What would be a good design pattern to put these dashboards behind auth? I suppose since they're static files you could just serve them with something like FastAPI or Spring Boot and have your CI/CD refresh the static files throughout the day on shared storage?

I'd recommend a reverse proxy and login server using "forward auth". I made a list of such login servers here: https://github.com/lastlogin-io/obligator?tab=readme-ov-file...

Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#109

Post by bsimpson »

mbostock wrote: post #9

Hey, HN. We’re thrilled to release Observable Framework today — a new open-source tool for developing data apps. I highly recommend viewing this example report adapted from our internal dashboard analyzing web logs: https://observablehq.com/framework/examples/api/ This technique of “just plot everything” (7.6M requests as a scatterplot) has revealed surprising insights we’ve used to optimize our servers and better co…

You've sponsored some very cool, state of the art tools. I've had friends work at Observable. I want you to succeed.

I tried to get our team to use Observable Notebooks a few years back. The researchers I work with are more comfortable in Python. Clearly that's one of the things you're trying to solve in this release. The other half of that uphill battle was discomfort posting code externally. In some ways you've also mitigated that in this release, but I wonder how sustainable it is.

Small teams eat for free by virtue of being small. Large organizations with trepidation or bureaucracy about using SaaS hosting will self host. That leaves the people in the middle: big enough to need to pay, but small enough to not have institutional problems with external hosting. Moreover, if the Observable bill ever gets much higher than the equivalent on Firebase et. al., the medium guys can self-host too.

How do you anticipate the paid side of the new business to work out? What's the hook (beyond thinking you guys are cool and trying to keep you in business) that gets someone to pay for Observable?

Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

#110

Post by tetris11 »

I miss source loading D3 into a simple HTML page, and having D3 tutorials that were up to spec with the latest D3 release.

Yeah Observable data pages look cool, but it really feels like excessive JS bloat for the features.

I think I miss throwing a D3 viz together without having to load an entire framework library.

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