Hi everyone, My colleague and I are currently doing our Master’s internship, and we are working on a synaptic plasticity model built with the SciML ecosystem. Our main goal right now is to build a user-friendly interface so that biologists can easily run simulations, tweak parameters (like tempera…

FWIW you can deploy a Makie dashboard to the web as long as it is backed by a Julia server, using WGLMakie and Bonito. So that is one way to do both.

I think the most flexible approach would be to deploy a Genie.jl application, then inside that application, you can use Bonito.jl to generate an interactive dashboard and write it to HTML as suggested by @asinghvi17 . For install convenience, you can consider creating a Pkg app: 6. Apps · Pkg.jl . Us…

From my experience the lowest entrance barrier is to provide it as a web service. Eventually, that will run into limitations in terms of number of concurrent users or amount of data people can process, etc. So I’d treat it as a way to give people a way to try it out and then you could distribute a…

[image] langestefan: I think the most flexible approach would be to deploy a Genie.jl application, then inside that application, you can use Bonito.jl to generate an interactive dashboard and write it to HTML as suggested by @asinghvi17 . Is there an example of this ?

I’m not really sure why one would use Genie with Bonito, since Bonito should offer most Genie features. So I’d use either Genie or Bonito, but I’m obviously biased there :wink: Bonito has the best Makie integration, if that’s important, since WGLMakie is implemented using Bonito. Lots of people al…

[image] Luca_Maria_Moccia: Cons: Requires the end-user (biologists) to install Julia locally and deal with the “Time To First Plot” / precompilation times (which can be a bit scary for non-coders). This is precisely the hurdle that AppBundler.jl addresses — it makes it straightforward to crea…

[image] sdanisch: I’m not really sure why one would use Genie with Bonito, since Bonito should offer most Genie features. So I’d use either Genie or Bonito, but I’m obviously biased there :wink: I wasn’t aware that Bonito could do so many things :wink: If someone could explain the difference…

If you’re up for a slightly different UI paradigm, I can recommend CImGui.jl and ImPlot.jl for this kind of thing. The TTFX is very low and in my experience it’s much easier to build interactive UIs with an immediate mode library. (disclaimer: I’m a maintainer of both those libraries)

Depends on what the needs/audience will be, but I’ll also shamelessly put in a plug for Tachikoma.jl, the new kid on the block, if your needs would be well served by a responsive terminal based UI which can also handle pixel graphics, plots from Makie.jl, etc. I think the other frameworks suggested …

I’ll throw in another vote for Bonito + Makie. It’s not quite 100% mature, but we had good experience with it, and the authors are responsive on this forum if you have any issue. For those of you who have built interfaces for differential equation models, which path did you choose and why ? Which…

Building a UI for a SciML biological model: Genie.jl (Web App) vs. Makie.jl (Local GUI)?

General Usage

Ronis_BR March 24, 2026, 1:26am 13

Furthermore, since Tachikoma.jl works entirely on Julia without relying on external servers or other things, it is so much easier to integrate the UI with the back end. It was very straightforward to build this app.

Topic		Replies	Views
State of Julia Interactive Apps, Executables and WebApps General Usage webapps , package-compiler , app	9	658	December 1, 2025
Shiny for Julia [work in progress, early request for feedback] Web Stack webapps	30	10353	April 15, 2020
Front ends for Julia codebases? Offtopic	72	11582	June 16, 2020
Anyone crazy enough to develop a pure Julia GUI toolbox? Visualization package , gui	193	17830	July 15, 2025
Which library for a Monte Carlo web app? Visualization	5	586	December 1, 2021

Building a UI for a SciML biological model: Genie.jl (Web App) vs. Makie.jl (Local GUI)?

Related topics