Pyxley: Python Powered Dashboards

http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2015/07/16/pyxley/

by astrobiased • 11 years ago

240 46 11 years ago

multithreaded.stitchfix.com

looks cool. shiny is very neat, but has the limitation of having R behind it and debugging ain't fun. I very much look forward to testing pyxley!

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

Why is having R a limitation? R is a fantastic data language which arguably beats all others in terms of number of libraries and data manipulation tools.

claytonjy2• 11 years ago

If GP comes from a more software-dev background, I can understand a general dislike for R. There's lots of things where R can't be beat right now, but for simple data analysis and visualization, there's some damn good python packages like pandas and d3py that GP may find easier to use than dataframes/tables and rCharts in R.

Lofkin2• 11 years ago

R has no native bayesian library like Pymc 3 (Must use stan which is c++). Also Python is better for ad hoc and agent based modeling and for out of core data with blaze and dask.

So no, R is not ahead in everything.

njharman2• 11 years ago

link to examples is 404, a possibly correct link https://github.com/stitchfix/pyxley/tree/master/examples

astrobiased• 11 years ago

Fixed! Thanks for the catch.

jfe2• 11 years ago

looks great. but i can't help but think it would save everyone a lot of time -- maybe not up-front, but in the long-run -- if we wrote these frameworks in c and just wrote language bindings for r, python, ruby, etc. why are we rebuilding good frameworks over again just because they're not written in our preferred language?

smacktoward• 11 years ago

Good idea! What's stopping you?

codemac• 11 years ago

There is a big divide between interpreted and compiled resources though.

If you have the original source in an interpreted language, it supports your ARM raspberry pi or chromebook just as well. With the C variation you need to build / package / install.

I've kinda just come to accept that code re-use cross language has never been good except with the unix pipe.

jfe2• 11 years ago

haven't linux package managers (e.g. emerge, aptitude, yum, etc.) basically solved the packaging problem?

potatosareok• 11 years ago

Except tons of Python code depends on C. This project depends on Pandas. Pandas has C dependency.

So to run this there's code that needs to be compiled anyway.

sshillo• 11 years ago

Will work great until you try to render 50,000 points and your browser crashes because it's build on d3.

huac3• 11 years ago

D3 is pretty ok with large datasets but I understand your point.

What Shiny does to get around this is natively 'evaluate' the plots on the backend, creating a rasterized PNG file. A similar approach could work for Pyxley (using matplotlib or Seaborn to render the plot, and then sending that image file to the front end) but I fear with so much development time spent on d3 support such an approach would not be natively implemented.

claytonjy2• 11 years ago

What Shiny does to get around this is natively 'evaluate' the plots on the backend, creating a rasterized PNG file

I don't think that's the case for D3 charts, because that would kill the interactivity that is so great about D3. I use RCharts to inject D3 into my Shiny applications, and have ran into into performance issues with just a couple hundred data points. I think this is because all heavy lifting is done by the client (browser), not the server.

snowwindwaves2• 11 years ago

Unless you have a screen with 50,000 pixels you would need to downsample the data anyway, wouldn't you normally do that instead of handling a visualization library the full data set?

reverius42• 11 years ago

You actually do have a screen with 50k pixels. Many more than that.

A continuous heat map over two dimensions, at 500x500 pixels, is 250,000 pixels. Of course, to generate the heat map, you have to aggregate (binning on two dimensions), but you don't have to downsample.

njharman2• 11 years ago

I've been looking for something to do this (below) in python at least on backend.

Big screen on wall with 6 or so boxes. Each box displaying data which updates in real time. Such as

  - scrolling list of source control commits
  - graph of busy/idle slaves
  - single big number, pending builds
  - graph of open ticket counts
  - etc

I can't tell if this is one of Pyxley's use cases?

davewongillies2• 11 years ago

I think Tipboard might be more what you're after:

  - https://github.com/allegro/tipboard
  - http://tipboard.readthedocs.org/

akama• 11 years ago

I actually just implemented some thing very similar to this. You probably want to checkout Dashing [1] which has built in plugins for a lot of things already. It's pretty easy to work with as well.

[1] https://shopify.github.io/dashing/

davewongillies2• 11 years ago

And if the parent prefers doing it in python, there's pydashie [1], a python port of Dashing.

[1] https://github.com/evolvedlight/pydashie

scott_karana2• 11 years ago

Dashing is great, but it's Ruby on the backend, not Python :)

huac3• 11 years ago

How easy is it to integrate a chart or graph into a larger project? My biggest gripe with Shiny is how difficult is to use the R calculate and graphing functions in a larger project without using OpenCPU as an API.

My guess is that with Python being a more general purpose language, this should be easier..

nmkridler3• 11 years ago

It shouldn't be too bad. My goal was just to make it a little simpler to do the basic things like formatting the data as json for a particular charting library. The python helpers just set up the APIs. I made an example called custom_react that shows how I mixed some custom code with some pyxley stuff.

trestletech• 11 years ago

I've been working on a lightweight API solution for R recently. Still needs a bit of devops tooling, but I think the code is converging on stability.

superuser2• 11 years ago

For backend monitoring purposes, one common solution is to stand up statsd and consume it from Grafana.

blumkvist2• 11 years ago

Why you don't want to use OpenCPU?

huac3• 11 years ago

I've been working with it and it's not bad - won't tear my hair out if it's what I use in the end. But a couple pain points for me are the need to rewrite my code to grab 'session variables', needing to understand how images are returned, especially if you need to return more than one, and so on - versus Shiny, which allows me to more or less drop in the code I've already been working with. Oh, and parallel requests are just not possible.

Of course, most of these issues are understandable and possibly by design, especially since OpenCPU was designed for embedded systems. That's fine - it just makes creating webapps or dashboards around R a more complicated usecase.

ivan_ah• 11 years ago

How important is flask in this mix? How difficult would it be to back this by a django app for example? I'm asking because the charting would be REALLY useful for me right now, and I already have the django models...

nmkridler3• 11 years ago

The flask dependency is pretty strong because I used the requests module for the api route functions. It should be possible to override it and use django instead, but I don't know django that well. It's probably a good idea to separate that dependency so it's a little more flexible.

meowface• 11 years ago

The flask dependency is pretty strong because I used the requests module for the api route functions.

Not sure I understand? Are you talking about Kenneth Reitz's requests module? Why would that tie you to Flask or any other framework or library?

pyoung• 11 years ago

If you already have a working web app, why not just use something like flot[1] for your charting (or d3 if you are up for it). Seems like pyxley is more targeted at people who have some data in pandas and want to get some visualizations on the web quickly.

[1]http://www.flotcharts.org/

rrggrr• 11 years ago

Too many dependencies and layers as compared to a pure python solution like bokeh, or seaborn and flask. I like that dataframe integration.

jqm• 11 years ago

Wow, this is really cool. Playing around w/ US state maps in examples right now. I love stuff like this partially because of the hands on introductions to component technologies I had heard of but not used before.

m_mueller• 11 years ago

This seems nice, but where did you define the datasource(s) for your examples? Did I miss something? I'm already using Flask, so I'd be interested in using this.

butwhy• 11 years ago

Hmm I have a python script that monitors a few datapoints but don't know how to appropriately save them and plot data on a graph/webpage. I might give this a shot?

Pyxley: Python Powered Dashboards

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