[HN Gopher] Offline-First PWA for Plotly Visualization of CSV vi...
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Offline-First PWA for Plotly Visualization of CSV via SQLite
Author : lana-k
Score : 164 points
Date : 2021-05-15 13:48 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jimsparkman wrote:
| This looks really great, like a local version of redash but way
| more in the way of charting options. Such simplicity to boot.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| PWA?
| code-is-code wrote:
| Progressive Web App
| rubiquity wrote:
| Programmaz Wit Attitudes
| rebhan wrote:
| Why Plotly, isnt https://echarts.apache.org/en/index.html more
| powerful ?
| lana-k wrote:
| Plotly has this: https://github.com/plotly/react-chart-editor.
| Is there something similar for echarts?
|
| Anyway, thank you for a hint.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| I can't tell, their lets-reimplement-scrolling-in-js gallery
| page is breaking in my Firefox.
| chunkyks wrote:
| I was looking for something like this the other day. I ended up
| just implementing functions directly in sql like
| plot_bar(category, value), plot_points(xval, yval), which open a
| popup with the chart.
| technologia wrote:
| This is great, your demo's music just made the task seem
| hilariously easy.
| hmsimha wrote:
| This seems really neat. Curious if you saw this magic SQLite ->
| Static file tool shared here a couple of weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27016630
|
| IIUC It would enable this tool to work with a dataset in sqlite
| that could be recompiled as static files periodically, and the
| relevant queries could be made on the front-end without having to
| load the whole data-set or select a CSV file from the filesystem.
| Would also lead to much better performance if you want users to
| be able to host generated charts on a static file server,
| presumably the output could be committed to git and then synced
| to a github pages or something.
|
| edit: It appears the author of that tool is using Plotly as well
| in the demo website. An integration of these would be incredible.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Perhaps a dumb question but why is offline stressed so much here?
| Nothing in the underlying tech seems to suggest one should expect
| it to not work offline?
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Because you don't want your application to become potato on
| each network hiccup?
| aseipp wrote:
| You need to use specific browser APIs (Service Workers) in
| order to support "offline mode" for a webpage, including
| support when there's no internet at all. This means the page
| and its content is stored locally for later, separately from
| normal HTTP caching.
|
| Yes, if you loaded the page once into a tab and then never
| closed it ever again, then it doesn't matter so much and you
| could use it if your internet shat out, but in practice people
| close and then re-open things later under varying network
| conditions.
| osrec wrote:
| Browser based apps generally struggle to function well offline
| (this is also true of certain native apps, but that's a whole
| other discussion). Using the PWA "toolbox" you can have in-
| browser apps stored locally via service workers so that they
| work without needing to fetch anything via the internet.
|
| It's rather useful, and can provide a much better user
| experience, especially when you have a patchy network.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| What's an example of a large tech product that functions as a
| PWA that users really love?
| jononor wrote:
| Dunno about "really love" anymore, but gmail?
| osrec wrote:
| There's Twitter's PWA, which isn't too bad in my opinion.
|
| My product has approx 300k users and is a PWA:
| https://usebx.com - our users seem to like it :)
| dkarp wrote:
| If you don't mind me asking, how does your product make
| money?
| osrec wrote:
| We have a quota on the number of documents you can
| create, after which you must subscribe. It's a very
| generous quota, but we still have a good number of people
| subscribing.
|
| Our major income comes from larger corporate contracts
| with medium to large businesses, that deploy our product
| on-prem. Often these were people who used our SaaS
| product, liked it, and asked us to deploy it internally
| for their business. Much less hassle than running a
| company that's purely SaaS based, and more stable income!
| echoradio wrote:
| I don't know if meets the condition of "users really love,"
| but don't Google Docs have the capability of functioning as
| an offline PWA?
| lana-k wrote:
| Other users have already explained the technical aspect of PWA
| (i.e. you can install it and run offline as a desktop app). I
| just want to add that by offline-first I also mean
| confidentiality -- your data doesn't leave your device, whether
| you're offline or not.
| osrec wrote:
| Really like the concept and demo. And it looks well made! Just
| out of interest, is this something you did as a hobby/for fun, or
| was there a particular use case you were addressing?
| lana-k wrote:
| It started as a collaboration with
| https://pypi.org/project/Procpath/. For me as a frontend
| developer it's an interesting challenge to develop, in fact, a
| desktop app (with background workers running a database and
| exchanging data with the main thread and so on) in the form of
| progressive web app (PWA).
|
| But in general I want to solve a problem: a lot of people know
| SQL which is actually powerful to wrangle data to prepare it
| for visualisation and analysis. It can't be simpler than drag-
| and-dropping a CSV into a browser, producing a result set and
| consuming it by the visualisation component (now Plotly, but
| more to come).
| osrec wrote:
| Genuinely impressed! For me, the most impressive part is the
| configurability of the charts. Did you implement each
| configuration for each chart type individually, or were you
| leveraging some library to help populate the chart
| configuration parameters?
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(page generated 2021-05-15 23:00 UTC)