Live data from Hacker News

Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps

observablehq.com

71–80 of 157 posts

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

#71

Another tidbit buried in this announcement is that Observable Framework is 100% vanilla JavaScript syntax — so you get Observable’s reactive runtime without the quirky Observable JavaScript syntax (as in Observable notebooks). And you can use static ES imports from npm or local modules, declare multiple top-level variables in a code block (not just a single named variable per cell), call the built-in display(…) funct…

Thanks for highlighting this. Realistically, this is what will make me want to try it out.

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

#72
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…

While the docs look great, I'm having trouble getting over the hump of starting. It would be great if you had a repo with a started app we could fork and play around with to help us understand everything before diving in from scratch.

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

#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.

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

#74
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…

While the docs look great, I'm having trouble getting over the hump of starting. It would be great if you had a repo with a started app we could fork and play around with to help us understand everything before diving in from scratch.

Did you try running `npm init @observablehq`? It’ll create a starter app for you with everything you need to get started, as described in the Getting started tutorial.

https://observablehq.com/framework/getting-started

If you want more starter apps to look at, you can browse our examples on GitHub:

https://github.com/observablehq/framework/tree/main/examples

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

#75
post #64

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…

(disclosure: Quarto dev here). I'm a huge Observable fan. Speaking entirely for myself, this space is so important that I'm thrilled to have more activity rather than less. Quarto's great and Observable's great. I hope folks pick the tool that's best for their use case!

I'm looking forward to learning more about which one makes it easier to see how various possible changes in the data are mapped to legible changes in the visualization.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Obse…

Interesting!

What are your thoughts on PRQL (integrated with DuckDB)?

Also: sure, I get your point on opinionated viz, but this means someone already "played with the data" to figure out what to viz "cleanly", and then coded that

now what if we want to build a viz to do this first "data playground" allowing to ruffle with the data? we would need some sort of interactivity

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

#77
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…

Hi! Some background first: I'm putting together a blog right now using Hugo and D3. I'm a huge fan of D3's infinite flexibility, as seen in some famous scrollytellers [0-1], and I've spent some time experimenting with that format myself [2]. My question is: what does Observable Framework offer for data storytellers who want to blog? Is this meant to go up against Hugo/Jekyll in terms of full-fledged max-efficiency si…

We’re not expressly targeting the blogging use case — we primarily want to support data apps, dashboards, and reports. But Observable Framework is quite flexible and you can use it for a lot of things; the Framework documentation is itself written using Framework, for example. So I would say that if you are working with data and you want an automated process to keep your data up-to-date, or to work with multiple languages (e.g., Python and JavaScript), or if you want to do a lot of interactive visualizations then you should give Framework a go. But we don’t have much built-in affordances for blogging, so you might find some things missing. Feel free to file feature requests! We’d love to hear your ideas, though we’re primarily focused on reporting and data app development for work.

I’m not sure what better integration with other blogging frameworks would look like — like, part of the page is rendered by Framework, but the site as a whole is handled by the blogging framework? Perhaps we could develop Framework’s API further so it could function like a plugin. But this is speculative and not a priority for us currently. If you explore the possibilities here please let us know!

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

#78
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…

Thank you. At a minimum, you could iframe pages built with Framework, or have them live alongside your other pages and link to them. Maybe it would be possible to use Framework’s internal API to generate HTML that could be embedded within another static site generator page but we haven’t explored that idea yet.

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

#79
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(disclosure: Quarto dev here). I'm a huge Observable fan. Speaking entirely for myself, this space is so important that I'm thrilled to have more activity rather than less. Quarto's great and Observable's great. I hope folks pick the tool that's best for their use case!

I'm looking forward to learning more about which one makes it easier to see how various possible changes in the data are mapped to legible changes in the visualization.

... sorry about the weird question, but do I know you in person? (there's a tiny chance your comment is specifically an obscure inside joke from a past life of mine, and I can't stop myself from taking the bait if so)

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

#80
post #47

There's an almost bewildering amount of interesting ideas buried in this. Things like data loaders which are ANY script that can output data (as JSON or something else) to standard output. Markdown files with ```js blocks in that get executed. The reinvention of the core Observable notebook to avoid custom syntax. This is really big.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN