I'm curious where this fits in relative to streamlit which I use heavily
Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
21–30 of 157 posts
Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
#22Lots of good stuff here, but are you really naming your framework "Framework" (as in "With Framework, you can build...")? You do realize that naming only makes sense inside your own company, right? To everyone who uses it, it's "a" framework or "Observable's framework". No consumer of the framework is going to refer to it as "Framework" without ridiculous amounts of confusion resulting.
Yes, it is confusing. It took me sometime to realize their product name itself is framework.
Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
#23Hey, 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…
This seems nice and the plots look great, but I have a hard time imagining switching to Observable from Plotly since there doesn't seem to be a way to make any plots interactive. By which I mean Zoom and Pan. The nearest point high light feature is nice, but what if I want to zoom in? None of the examples here seem to be able to do that and quick google search doesn't make it seem like that's straight forward. That's…
Though it’s not designed for animation, Observable Plot is just a JavaScript library and it renders fast enough that you can do things like that just by re-rendering. Here are some old notebooks with experiments with audio data hooked up to UI controls:
https://observablehq.com/collection/@skybrian/observable-plo...
Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
#24This is really a game changer for creating data apps. I loved observable, but convincing scientists with no js knowledge to try the platform was almost impossible. Markdown + language agnostic loaders seems like the perfect way to collaborate.
Are there any plans to allow existing observable notebooks to be deployed? For example, a one-click “deploy” button?
Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
#25Hey, 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…
Super cool! Especially for low cardinality, low interactivity dashboards this approach makes a ton of sense.
How is Observable going to make money off of the framework?
Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
#26The new direction seems very similar to what evidence has been doing for a while https://evidence.dev
Thanks for sharing. Evidence looks pretty great! Git controlled BI reporting.
Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
#27Lots of good stuff here, but are you really naming your framework "Framework" (as in "With Framework, you can build...")? You do realize that naming only makes sense inside your own company, right? To everyone who uses it, it's "a" framework or "Observable's framework". No consumer of the framework is going to refer to it as "Framework" without ridiculous amounts of confusion resulting.
Observable has other open source libraries with similar "generic" names: Plot, Runtime, Inputs. When speaking generically, most people say "Observable Plot" or "Observable Runtime." In projects where people already know about them, then I say "Plot" or "Inputs" without much fuss.
I imagine most people will say "Observable Framework" when talking out in the open, and "Framework" on established projects.
Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
#28No mention of math formatting but from the docs it looks like there is TeX support!
Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
#29Hey, 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…
Is this meant to be a competitor to tools like Tableau or Metabase? Something more dev-friendly and maybe git-versioned as opposed to a configurable SaaS tool?
Re: Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps
#30Hey, 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…
This seems nice and the plots look great, but I have a hard time imagining switching to Observable from Plotly since there doesn't seem to be a way to make any plots interactive. By which I mean Zoom and Pan. The nearest point high light feature is nice, but what if I want to zoom in? None of the examples here seem to be able to do that and quick google search doesn't make it seem like that's straight forward. That's…
We’re working on zooming and panning for Observable Plot (https://github.com/observablehq/plot/pull/1738) and other interactions such as brushing (https://github.com/observablehq/plot/pull/721) — all of this is already possible, we just haven’t packaged it up in a convenient way yet (https://github.com/observablehq/plot/pull/1871). And as skybrian pointed out, you can also get interactivity “for free” with Observable’s reactivity and re-rendering.
We’ve been focused primarily on the static display of visualizations because that’s what viewers see first, and often that’s often the only thing they see. Relying too heavily on interaction places an onus on the user to find the insights; a good display of data should be opinionated about what it shows and guide the user to what is interesting.
We’re not trying to convince you to switch to JavaScript here — a main value prop of Observable Framework is that you can write data loaders in any language (Python, R, Go, Julia, etc.). So do all your data preparation and analysis in whatever language you like, and then do your front-end in JavaScript to leverage the graphics and interactive compute capabilities of modern browsers. It’s pipes and child_process.spawn under the hood. And you still get instant reactivity when you save changes to your data loaders (when you edit Python) because Framework watches files and pushes new data to the client with reactive hot data & module replacement.
And you can compress (aggregate or filter) the data as much as you like, so it’s up to you how much data you send to the client. For example your data loader could be a minimal CSV file that’s just the numbers you need for a bar chart. Or it could be a Parquet file and you use DuckDB (https://observablehq.com/framework/lib/duckdb) on the client to generate dynamic visualizations.