BokehJS¶

BokehJS Motivations¶

When researching the wide field of JavaScript plotting libraries, we found that they were all architected and designed to integrate with other JavaScript. If they provided any server-side wrappers, those were always “second class” and primarily designed to generate a simple configuration for the front-end JS. Of the few JS plotting libraries that offered any level of interactivity, the interaction was not really configurable or customizable from outside the JS itself. Very few JS plotting libraries took large and streaming server-side data into account, and providing seamless access to those facilities from another language like Python was not a consideration.

This, in turn, has caused the developers of Python plotting libraries to only treat the browser as a “backend target” environment, for which they will generate static images or a bunch of JavaScript.

Goals¶

BokehJS is intended to be a standalone, first-class JavaScript plotting library and interaction runtime for dynamic, highly-customizable information visualization. Currently we use HTML5 Canvas, and in the future this may be extended to include WebGL. We are keeping a very close watch over high-performance JavaScript technologies, including web workers, asm.js, SIMD, and parallel JS (e.g. River Trail).

Interface¶

BokehJS is a standalone JavaScript library for dynamic and interactive visualization in the browser. It is built on top of HTML5 canvas, and designed for high-performance rendering of larger data sets. Its interface is declarative, in the style of Protovis, but its implementation consists of a reactive scene graph (similar to Chaco).

More information is available at Developing with JavaScript.