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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

#131

Post by politician »

laurels-marts wrote: post #129
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…

Very impressive and will definitely server many use-cases. However, it's static site with data refresh at build time. Does this mean there cannot be user-based row-level security (i.e. selective access)? One of the main selling points of the clunky, general purpose drag-and-drop BI tools (Power BI, Tableau etc.) is selective access. This is especially important in larger enterprises and for customer-facing dashboards…

Route per authorization scope?

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

#132

Post by mbostock »

kuatroka wrote: post #121
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…

3. Apache echarts are much more interactive out of the box. The API is indeed clunky, but they’ve got all the chart type and all interactions you might need. IMHO, Plot in comparison, is very limited in interactivity and even chart types ( there are no heat maps or donuts). echarts have a huge example library with clear examples and though Plot has it too, the library is not thought out well. You might looks at an ex…

There are lots of ways to do heatmaps with Observable Plot. See the raster, contour, and cell marks.

https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/raster https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/contour https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/cell

We generally recommend stacked bar charts over pie and donut charts, so we haven’t prioritized those. But you can already implement them using custom marks, and there’s even a hacky way of doing them using Plot’s map projection system.

https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/pie-to-donut-chart

I don’t understand your comment about the “D3 example.” If you’re looking for Plot examples, you can find them linked from the Plot documentation and the gallery:

https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-gallery

Plot is designed to be extended with JavaScript (rather than a non-JavaScript DSL such as Vega-Lite), such as for custom marks and data transforms. So you might occasionally see other libraries being used together with Plot.

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

#133

Post by espinielli »

asimpletune wrote: post #63
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…

One question I have is if there's a way to integrate an observable framework project into an existing static site? I see how I could easily add a project as a subdomain, but what if I wanted to interleave a project I make with observable framework into my existing domain and that static site generator I already use for that domain? By the way, thank you making this. I've been reading and enjoying very much the docume…

That is my point too. Now that I have tried Observable Framework (and before it D3, Plot, Observable Notebook) I do not think I can propose to change our statically generated site to just use Observable Framework. I will explore ways to migrate parts of the existing stuff and how integrate new pages generated by Framework... A Big Bang is not an option for us... (for anybody I guess, so it looks quite a need...but I understand that it doesn't go in the right business direction for Observable the company)

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

#134

Post by recifs »

kuatroka wrote: post #124

Are you planning to add new UI components like Data Table or other in the future or it’s purely Plotting and Data ingestion and the UI through Tailwind or CSS or would it be possible to add UI libraries like shadcn or DaisyUI to make it a full fledged web site? Thanks

It’s only the first public release, rest assured we have plans to develop it beyond that point :-) Data tables are high on the list, but it’s going to be a lot of work and I can’t say when we’ll have something to share. In the meantime almost any library available on npm should work out of the box—not just the ones that we added explicit support for (even though of course some might need more work than others).

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

#135

Post by mbostock »

laurels-marts wrote: post #129
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…

Very impressive and will definitely server many use-cases. However, it's static site with data refresh at build time. Does this mean there cannot be user-based row-level security (i.e. selective access)? One of the main selling points of the clunky, general purpose drag-and-drop BI tools (Power BI, Tableau etc.) is selective access. This is especially important in larger enterprises and for customer-facing dashboards…

Right, conceptually it’s static files, but we could develop a hybrid approach where the server does additional data processing on-demand. We already offer access control, but we could also serve different data snapshots to different users, or even filter the data snapshots based on the user. It still has to be fast, though.

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

#136

Post by kuatroka »

mbostock wrote: post #132
kuatroka wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. Apache echarts are much more interactive out of the box. The API is indeed clunky, but they’ve got all the chart type and all interactions you might need. IMHO, Plot in comparison, is very limited in interactivity and even chart types ( there are no heat maps or donuts). echarts have a huge example library with clear examples and though Plot has it too, the library is not thought out well. You might looks at an ex…

There are lots of ways to do heatmaps with Observable Plot. See the raster, contour, and cell marks. https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/raster https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/contour https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/cell We generally recommend stacked bar charts over pie and donut charts, so we haven’t prioritized those. But you can already implement them using custom marks, and there’s even a hacky way of do…

I'll check the raster, contour, and cell marks. Thanks.

"I don’t understand your comment about the “D3 example.”..." 1. When I visit the Plot Gallery https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-gallery 2. Go down the page to "More from Observable creators" 3. Select an example I like, for example - https://observablehq.com/d/3ea4b4458fed9242?page=2&collectio...

It turns out it's D3, not Plot. I think you just have all possible viz in this section, but for me as a user coming from the Observable Plot page and clicking on "See more..." my expectation is to see only examples of what could be done with Plot, not both D3 and Plot. I need to explicitly click on each link an check if it's Plot based or not. It gets tiresome and the curiosity just wanes away. Thanks.

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

#137

Post by mbostock »

ipsum2 wrote: post #118
mbostock wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we use continuous deployment (cron) to rebuild as needed. You can also get realtime data on the client if you need to (via fetch or WebSocket to your own servers — it’s “just” JavaScript), but generally we find building static data snapshots a useful constraint because it forces you to think about exactly what data is needed, and as a result the dashboard loads instantly.

My use case is monitoring machine learning models as they train, static snapshots doesn't seem like the right approach for me.

If you’re developing the models locally, perhaps Framework’s preview server could work: it watches local files and automatically pushes updates to the browser when files change. This enables reactive updates for data loaders, but also works with static files. So you could visualize the models as they are being generated — meaning as some external process writes local files.

But in general the use case we’re targeting is a shared data app, dashboard, or report. Not something just for you individually, or something ephemeral (that you look at in real-time during training). For example, Framework would work well for sharing a report or dashboard evaluating the performance of the latest models you’ve built with your team.

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

#138

Post by mbostock »

apitman wrote: post #105
mbostock wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

See Leland Wilkinson’s The Grammar of Graphics. He describes the difference between a chart typology (a fixed set of chart types with a fixed set of configuration options) and a grammar of graphics (a set of orthogonal primitives that can be composed in arbitrary ways).

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

#139

Post by mbostock »

kuatroka wrote: post #136
mbostock wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of ways to do heatmaps with Observable Plot. See the raster, contour, and cell marks. https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/raster https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/contour https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/cell We generally recommend stacked bar charts over pie and donut charts, so we haven’t prioritized those. But you can already implement them using custom marks, and there’s even a hacky way of do…

I'll check the raster, contour, and cell marks. Thanks. "I don’t understand your comment about the “D3 example.”..." 1. When I visit the Plot Gallery https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-gallery 2. Go down the page to "More from Observable creators" 3. Select an example I like, for example - https://observablehq.com/d/3ea4b4458fed9242?page=2&collectio... It turns out it's D3, not Plot. I think you just have al…

That “More from Observable creators” is just a standard footer we put across the site for signed-out users to showcase community content across Observable. It’s not part of the notebook. You can ignore everything below the “Appendix”.
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