It has so-called JS client. But all the docs or demos are written from the point of Python developer.
Does bokeh has standalone, non-python JavaScript API, and is it used by anyone in non-python environments?
Does bokeh has standalone, non-python JavaScript API
As of late 2019: Somewhat! (See below for more context)
and is it used by anyone in non-python environments?
Yes, definitely, though pure-BokehJS usage levels are still low compared to Python APIs. Improving the JS story is a 2020 goal.
A little history
The Bokeh project was started in 2012 with the explicit goal of providing Python developers a way to publish interactive visualizations in the web, without themselves having to get into "web tech", i.e. JavaScript. As such, the BokehJS library (which has always existed) was originally mostly a largely undocumented implementation detail. It didn't really help that the Bokeh developers themselves were not JS experts at the time. (Some of us still are not!)
As things progressed, and features like CustomJS callbacks and the ability to make custom extensions were added, the BokehJS side of things became more and more publicly exposed. That said, until fairly recently, BokehJS development has been very fast and furious and we were not in any position to provide guarantees around core API stability or expend resources on documentation that would likely be out of date very quickly. As two examples, in the last year BokehJS was completely re-written in TypeScript, which rendered any old CoffeeScript extensions or callbacks deprecated. Additionally the entire layout system was re-vamped to afford much higher performance.
Current status
For some time, there has been a fairly stable "high level" API for BokehJS, and you can find details of that in the Developing with JavaScript chapter of the users guide. Additionally, all the low level "models" and their properties are 100% aligned up between Python and JS, so the Python Reference Guide actually has all the information you might need to use models on the JS side as well.
We are very interested in improving BokehJS for pure JS usage in the coming year. We have been getting some very helpful issues from folks actually using BokehJS directly. Some major hurdles will be overcome with the upcoming 2.0 release, but there will still be work to do to really provide a great user-experience for JS devs. This is actually a fantastic opportunity for any interested JS devs to have a big impact by offering their input, advice, and collaboration. Anyone so interested should head over to the Bokeh project Discourse.
Related
We are evaluating and looking for a workflow engine which support .NET-Core and I'd really appreciate the community input. I would like to hear on the suggestion based on your guys implementation stories.
My main evaluation criteria, so far, are below;
open source and OEM friendly license
production installations (success stories are a great help)
technical support available
open standards support - BPMN
dynamic creation/assembly of the workflow based on input
embeddable
Currently I am evaluating Elsa, Workflow Core, Argo, and Airflow. Elsa seems like a good candidate as well but never used it.
Do you guys have any successful deployments on Elsa workflow engine?
Full disclosure: I am the project lead of Elsa, but I will try and be as objective as I can.
Elsa does not currently support BPMN, so if this is a hard requirement then Elsa might not be suitable for your project. At least not until it implements BPMN in the future.
As for technical support, there is no official paid support available as of yet, but the community is very friendly & helpful, though still relatively small.
Dynamic creation based on input is possible since you can programmatically define workflows. But you cannot update workflows while it executes (which would be more or less similar to being able to update your C# program statements as your program runs). Not sure if this is what you are looking for or not?
Other than that, Elsa is OEM friendly, runs in production successfully at several companies that I know of and is embeddable.
We're a little aghast at how time consuming it is to develop syntactically correct ARM templates from scratch.
The Portal helps, but pushes out non-development ready templates (pretty hard to find what the bug is when all the templates use 'name' for the resource name, versus maybe something more verbose like ('microsoftStorageAccountResourceName', microsoftStorageAccountResourceLocation, microsoftStorageAccountResourceTags, etc.).
We understand that there are many ways to deploy -- but if at all possible, we'd like some assurances that ARM is the current preferred way and will continue to be the preferred primary means of scripting deployments via VSTS -- or is it sliding towards a different -- maybe more programmatic -- approach (eg: Powershell, CLI, other).
We're asking this because it looks like we will have to invest significant effort to create a resource library for this organisation (to decrease the need for all projects to become proficient at ARM deployment) -- and would prefer to do it using an approach that will be preferred by developers over the coming years, for maintainability objectives.
Thanks for any insight on which approach to recommend as the best investment.
Templates are going to be around for the foreseeable future... it really depends on whether you want to orchestrate the deployment yourself (imperative deployments using CLI, PS, SDK) or you want ARM to orchestrate the deployment (via templates). Happy to chat in offline if you want to discuss more - email bmoore at microsoft.
Writing this now one year after the original post: The answer to 'ARM Templates are still the preferred deployment mechanism?' probably depends on who you ask. "Preferred" by Microsoft according to their product strategy may be meant differently than preferred by actual users that, well, feel the pain of vendor strategy decisions. I had started with an Azure automation book that used PS scripting only; I was lead (maybe mis-lead?) then to the ARM Template deployment model, mainly by the Microsoft web documentations, but found out that those templates need so much rework that writing a PS script, or even writing an ARM Template from scratch, seems to be a more efficient way to go. In fact, I am confused at the moment about what the 'Best Practice' is, i.e. what method other developers actually use. Is there a community-established opinion on this matter, now in August 2019? Or is it all VSTS / 3rd-party IDEs nowadays?
So I'm new to node.js, javascript frameworks, and meteor.com. I'm trying to learn how to build social networks, and I'm naive/struggling to understand why Meteor.js (meteor.com) wouldn't be able to do all the great things you see now that twitter, facebook, instagram are doing?
There's the comet technology between client/server, authentication configs, asynchronous coding for scaling and performance, and built on top of node.js.
I'm trying to learn more about long polling, comet, gridFS or how files are stored, and in general things like replication sets, and sharding to help with performance (esp since Redhat has this openshift platform that we can build our own private clouds with).
I have some computer science background, but it seems like magic, so what am I missing? If you all could think of a few buzz words that make a social network tick that Meteor.js doesn't support, what would it be?
I hear things about parallel and concurrency (webworkers fixes that in part, no?), websockets, that high level languages like python or java are better off supporting. There's only one to learn my answers, and thats by doing, but thought someone could sway me one way or the other via this thread. Thanks!
This question encompasses a really broad idea and just focusing on using meteor alone would solve this issue. Here are a few points to consider:
I don't think this framework would be a good starting point to learn long-polling, gridFS, etc etc. Meteor aims to be a framework that tends to be more of an ecosystem of packages e.g. you can certainly roll your own aformentioned strategies -- however for dynamic updates, Meteor uses its own Data Delivery Protocol (DDP) supported/implemented by (surprise) a good bunch of core packages such as Spark.
Parallel processing and concurrency can be better off done using other languages, but why not with? Since Meteor is largely based on node.js, and node.js is really good with the aforementioned stuff plus it can play very well with other languages so you could integrate smoothly. Meteor doesn't really require you purely rely on it, as other languages would say the same thing. It's all in the general engineering / planning for your project. There are already lots of really good stuff out there that rely on Meteor, join in! don't be afraid. It all boils down to planning (and the courage/perseverance to pull it off, of course).
Right now, we cannot tell if Meteor would be incapable of the usual great stuff by gigantic websites. Sure, we can do live updates, (its own kind of) publish/subscribe patterns, and powerful stuff to boost development (look at the seven core concepts of meteor to best understand this). It is not impossible to replicate what is already out there, really. We can only say it with uncertainty at the moment mainly because.. (see next point)
The framework is so young! it's still at 0.6.x at the time of writing. Please take time to look at the Meteor Roadmap to see how things are going in terms of broader support for persistence/databases, performance considerations, and the official DDP specification.
I hope I have answered your enquiry (and more, I hope). I'm really excited for meteor myself as it could easily be the next big thing. We have a couple of (for-)production projects using Meteor as well, so you're getting direct insight from a person who has done quite a bit of hacking (and tons of research and first-hand experience) in Meteor. Not that i'm saying i'm an expert or so, it's just so much fun to work with Meteor and i'm totally not kidding you.
Hope this helps!
P.S.: Fair warning though, resources and documentation is really sparse at this point. I try to contribute to the community as much as I can about it (one of my starting points is here, on SO).
I've just discovered TideSDK and it seems to be a really great tool, but I have one requirement : I need to use some native code (for managing USB devices for example) and so I need communication between this native code and the web app, is such a thing possible with TideSDK?
Yes, working with native code in TideSDK is possible. Our SDK is modular and we have been reorganizing the code structurally to make it easier to do the sort of thing you want. At a modular level, you will be contending with support for multiple platforms typically.
A module should extend to all platforms that you are supporting. We expect to have documentation to help developers (familiar with native code) to better understand the SDK. This should include some module boilerplate to help you get started. At this point, we have yet to prepare this more detailed documentation. We have much to do and sometimes progress seems slow despite all the great efforts going into TideSDK.
TideSDK is a large and complex SDK but don't let this frighten you off. It is extensible and we will be shining light on this soon with module development guides. It would be cool to talk more on IRC about this with you so feel free to drop by at any time. Perhaps the functionality you are speaking of is of general use ie. to extend the APIs for everyone.
There are possibilities to work together with the core developers of TideSDK on modules and to contribute to this great open source project. Other possibilities also include sponsoring module development if this something that you need more immediately for a project. Hope this helps.
We're in the initial stages of a large project, and have decided that some form of automated UI testing is likely going to be useful for us, but have not yet sorted out exactly how this is going to work...
The primary goal is to automate a basic install and run-through of the app, so if a developer causes a major breakage (eg: app won't install, network won't connect, window won't display, etc) the testers don't have to waste their time (and get annoyed by) installing and configuring a broken build
A secondary goal is to help testers when dealing with repetitive tasks.
My question is: Who should create these kinds of tests? The implicit assumption in our team has been that the testers will do it, but everything I've read on the net always seems to imply that the developers will create them, as a kind of 'extended unit test'.
Some thoughts:
The developers seem to be in a much better position to do this, given that they know control ID's, classes, etc, and have a much better picture of how the app is working
The testers have the advantage of NOT knowing how the app is working, and hence can produce tests which may be much more useful
I've written some initial scripts using IronRuby and White. This has worked really well, and is powerful enough to do literally anything, but then you need to be able to write code to write the UI tests
All of the automated UI test tools we've tried (TestComplete, etc) seem to be incredibly complex and fragile, and while the testers can use them, it takes them about 100 times longer and they're constantly running into "accidental complexity" caused by the UI test tools.
Our testers can't code, and while they're plenty smart, all I got were funny looks when I suggested that testers could potentially write simple ruby scripts (even though said scripts are about 100x easier to read and write than the mangled mess of buttons and datagrids that seems to be the standard for automated UI test tools).
I'd really appreciate any feedback from others who have tried UI automation in a team of both developers and testers. Who did what, and did it work well? Thanks in advance!
Edit: The application in question is a C# WPF "rich client" application which connects to a server using WCF
Ideally it should really be QA who end up writing the tests. The problem with using a programmatic solution is the learning curve involved in getting the QA people up to speed with using the tool. Developers can certainly help with this learning curve and help the process by mentoring, but it still takes time and is a drag on development.
The alternative is to use a simple GUI tool which backs a language (and data scripts) and enables QA to build scripts visually, delving into the finer details of the language only when really necessary - development can also get involved here also.
The most successful attempts I've seen have definitely been with the latter, but setting this up is the hard part. Selenium has worked well for simple web applications and simple threads through the application. JMeter also (for scripted web conversations for web services) has worked well... Another option which is that of in house built test harness - a simple tool over the top of a scripting language (Groovy, Python, Ruby) that allows QA to put test data into the application either via a GUI or via data files. The data files can be simple properties files, or in more complex cases structured (something like YAML or even Excel) data files. That way they can build the basic smoke tests to start, and later expand that into various scenario driven tests.
Finally... I think rich client apps are way more difficult to test in this way, but it depends on the nature of the language and the tools available to you...
In my experience, testers who can code will switch jobs for a pay raise as developers.
I agree with you on the automated UI testing tools. Every place I've worked that was rich enough to afford WinRunner or LoadRunner couldn't afford the staff to actually use it. The prices may have changed, but back then, these were in the high 5-digit to low 6-digit price tags (think of the price of a starter home). The products were hard to use, and were usually kept uninstalled in a locked cabinet because everyone was afraid of getting in trouble for breaking them.
I worked over 7 years as an application developer before I finally switched to testing and test automation. Testing is much more challenging than coding, and any automation developer who wants to succeed should master testing skills.
Some time ago I put my thoughts on skill matrices in a couple of blog posts.
If interested to discuss:
http://automation-beyond.com/2009/05/28/qa-automation-skill-matrices/
Thanks.
I think having the developers write the tests will be of the most use. That way, you can get "breakage checking" throughout your dev cycle, not just at the end. If you do nightly automated builds, you can catch and fix bugs when they're small, before they grow into huge, mean, man-eating bugs.
What about the testers proposing the tests, and the developers actually writing it ?
I believe at first it largely depends on the tools you use.
Our company currently uses Selenium (We're a Java shop).
The Selenium IDE (which records actions in Firefox) works OK, but developers need to manually correct mistakes it makes against our webapps, so it's not really appropriate for QA to write tests with.
One thing I tried in the past (with some success), was to write library functions as wrappers for Selenium functions. They read as plain english:
selenium.clickButton("Button Text")
...but behind the scenes check for proper layout and tags on the button, has an id etc.
Unfortunately this required a lot of set up to allow easy writing of tests.
I recently became aware of a tool called Twist (from Thoughtworks, built on the Eclipse engine), which is a wrapper for Selenium, allowing plain English style tests to be written. I am hoping to be able to supply this to the testers, who can write simple assertions in plain English!
It automatically creates stubs for new assertions too, so the testers could write the tests, and pass them to developers if they need new code.
I've found the most reasonable option is to have enough specs such that the QA folks can stub out the test, basically figure out what they want to test at each 'screen' or on each component, and stub those out. The stubs should be named such that they're very descriptive as to what they're testing. This also offers a way to crystalize functional requirements. In fact, doing the requirements in this fashion are particularly easy, and help non-technical people really work through the muddy waters of their own though process.
The stubs can be filled in via a combination of QA/dev people. This allows you to CHEAPLY train QA people as to how to write tests, and they typically slurp it up as it furthers their job security.
I think it depends mostly on the skill level of your test team, the tools available, and the team culture with respect to how developers and testers interact with each other. My current situation is that we have a relatively technical test team. All testers are expected to have development skills. In our case, testers write UI Automation. If your test team doesn't have those skills they will not be set up for success. In that case, it may be best for developers to write you UI automation.
Other factors to consider:
What other testing tasks are on the testers' plate?
Who are your customers and what are their expectations related to quality?
What is the skill level of the development team and what is their willingness to take on test automation work?
-Ron