Bryan Van de Ven on Bokeh

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, subscribe to our mailing list, and donate to the show. Summary Bryan Van de Ven is the project maintainer for Bokeh, a plotting and visualization toolkit that allows Python developers to easily create attractive interactive visualizations for the web. We talked about the project’s history, some interesting use cases for it, and what its near future looks like. Bryan also told us about how Bokeh compares to some of the other visualization libraries in both Python and Javascript, as well as how to use Bokeh from other languages such as Scala and Lua. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at There is a new Python podcast that just started up recently! It’s called the Python Test Podcast and covers the world of testing in Python, so go ahead and give it a listen. You can find it at We are recording today on Aug 18th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Bryan Van de Ven about the Bokeh project Interview with Bryan Van de Ven Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? For our listeners who aren’t familiar with what Bokeh is, can you describe it? What inspired you to create Bokeh? Bokeh has integrations with some of the other Python graphing libraries such as matplotlib and seaborn. I can see how this would be useful to easily update existing code to publish visualizations on the web. Are there other use cases for these integrations? I noticed that Bokeh has bindings for some languages other than Python. R and Julia are obvious candidates due to their strong focus on analytics work, I’m curious what made you choose Scala and Lua as languages worth targeting? Do you lose any capabilities using the javascript library by itself? Other than the sample data sets that come with Bokeh, can you suggest a good publicly available data set with accompanying tutorial for people who want to get started with data visualization using Bokeh? Can you provide some comparisons between D3.js and the Bokeh javascript library in terms of capabilities and performance? The Bokeh project has a server component that allows for streaming data to clients. Can you describe the architecture of that and some example uses for it? Why was the server written as a Flask blueprint as opposed to making it a component of another framework such as Django or Pyramid and how difficult would it be to port the functionality to another system? What’s the most interesting use of Bokeh you’ve seen? Are you aware of any projects in other languages that are comparable to Bokeh? Picks Tobias wappalyzer The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Chris Edward Snowden Meets the IETF Between the World and Me Untapp’d Bryan Audiobooks Scribd – Subscription service for ebooks and audio books with a great selection Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks Cartographies of Time The Post-Modern Jukebox Keep In Touch Twitter Mailing List Bokeh Web Site Links vispy Vincent vega D3.js nbviewer.org bokeh page million song dataset data.gov ggplot / ggvis mathematica