Book Image

Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash

By : Elias Dabbas
Book Image

Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash

By: Elias Dabbas

Overview of this book

Plotly's Dash framework is a life-saver for Python developers who want to develop complete data apps and interactive dashboards without JavaScript, but you'll need to have the right guide to make sure you’re getting the most of it. With the help of this book, you'll be able to explore the functionalities of Dash for visualizing data in different ways. Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash will first give you an overview of the Dash ecosystem, its main packages, and the third-party packages crucial for structuring and building different parts of your apps. You'll learn how to create a basic Dash app and add different features to it. Next, you’ll integrate controls such as dropdowns, checkboxes, sliders, date pickers, and more in the app and then link them to charts and other outputs. Depending on the data you are visualizing, you'll also add several types of charts, including scatter plots, line plots, bar charts, histograms, and maps, as well as explore the options available for customizing them. By the end of this book, you'll have developed the skills you need to create and deploy an interactive dashboard, handle complexities and code refactoring, and understand the process of improving your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Building a Dash App
6
Section 2: Adding Functionality to Your App with Real Data
11
Section 3: Taking Your App to the Next Level

Creating your own Dash component

It's interesting to know that the official strategy for Dash is to be "React for Python, R, and Julia." As you might know, React is a very big JavaScript framework for building user interfaces. There is a massive library of open source React components, and Dash Core Components are basically React components made available in Python. This means that if there is any functionality that is not provided by Dash that you would like to have, you might consider developing it yourself, hiring a developer to build it, or you can also sponsor its development and have the Plotly team build it. Some of the components that we worked with were sponsored by clients who wanted to have certain functionality that wasn't available. This is one way to support Dash as well. It also benefits everyone who uses open source Dash.

There are clear instructions on how to create your own Dash components, and as a Dash developer, it's good to explore...