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Show HN: Datapane – A new way to build reports, dashboards, and apps in Python

Article news.ycombinator.com

Show HN: Datapane – A new way to build reports, dashboards, and apps in Python

Hello HN! We’re Leo and Mandeep, founders of Datapane (https://datapane.com).

We're building a way to create reports, dashboards, and web apps from your existing data using Python. Think of it as a combination of React and htmx, specifically designed for the Python data stack.

Our GitHub is https://github.com/datapane/datapane and you can try building a report or app in ~2 minutes on Codespaces: https://try.datapane.com

We started building Datapane at our previous start-up, where we struggled to deliver ML model results to clients. Much to our surprise, the data science took less time than repeatedly creating reports by copying and pasting plots into PowerPoint decks.

It seemed absurd that we had to switch to PowerPoint or legacy BI tools like Tableau to share, and our initial goal was to programmatically generate reports using the datasets and plots we had in Python. To enable this, we started hacking on a Python-based UI framework for constructing HTML views from data-centric blocks – like plots, data tables, and layout components.

You can export these to standalone HTML files, or host them as a web app on somewhere like GitHub Pages or Fly.io. We recently also added the ability to connect Python functions to forms and front-end events so you can build web apps which run backend code. We handle the entire network and RPC layer, so you only need to write plain Python functions that take parameters and return other blocks.

You can check out an example of the code to create a simple app: https://github.com/datapane/examples/blob/main/apps/iris-plo...

Datapane’s philosophy is pretty different from other products in the space.

We wanted to keep things simple, but avoid the footguns our users faced with frameworks like Streamlit, where the reactive/network-aware model was hard to move beyond an MVP or POC. For backend interactivity, we believe the original web got a lot right, and unlike reactive models which rely on websockets, Datapane is unashamedly request/response. This takes inspiration from HTTP and our own experiences with htmx, which offers an elegant way to add interactivity to HTML. Under the hood, we actually compile down to a (gasp!) XML-based hypermedia format, akin to HTML, but tailored specifically for constructing data UIs.

The result is that not every change in your app requires a server round trip, as much of it can be pre rendered and most interactivity happens on the client-side. In addition to improving performance, this also makes running in production become 10x simpler.

This separation between the view and backend compute also makes Datapane modular. If our app server isn’t a good fit for your use-case, serve Datapane views from the web-framework of your choice (we’ve been hacking on serving views from Django). Want to compute blocks from inside Airflow or generate them on a schedule or from a webhook? Computation can happen out of band of the UI. You can even build and host apps from inside of Jupyter, where you can preview blocks live and convert notebook cells to blocks in your view.

We currently offer a hosting platform on https://datapane.com for sharing reports publicly (free) or with your team (paid), and will be adding serverless app hosting support to it in the next few weeks.

Our ultimate goal is to create an open-source toolkit for building data products across the entire stack – from reports, to dashboards, to full-stack apps – all using 100% Python. You can see a few we’ve built already in our gallery: https://datapane.com/gallery

We’d love to hear your feedback.

Thanks!

Discussion 14 comments · 55 points · pea · 2023-03-23
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