PlotlyJS users poll

I just opened a PR to remove support/dependency on Blink that I expect will be controversial, check it out for more details. There are some good reasons to remove the dependency on Blink, but I recognize that my workflow of exclusively plotting in Jupyter may not be the norm.

(I also use PlotlyJS directly and not through Plots.jl. I don’t know if/how that has bearing on this discussion.)

How do you use/view your plots from PlotlyJS?

  • Blink
  • Jupyter
  • Both

0 voters

Not an answer to your question, but over in Bokeh.jl we only support basic rendering to HTML or the browser and a separate package BokehBlink.jl provides the option to render with Blink. I think it works very nicely.

2 Likes

Hi,

I use plotly mainly in the VS Code plot pane. Not sure if blink is needed for this.

2 Likes

Neither, I always use savefig and open the local file with Firefox.

I also have a convenience function the uses sed on the resulting html to redirect the external javascript files to local copies, so that I can use it offline.

I use PlotlyJS directly in the REPL but plot to ElectronDisplay, not Blink. Still, the PlotlyJS package has a dependency on Blink. I have not tested whether this could removed and not compared the loading times of using ElectronDisplay vs using Blink.

1 Like

Note the reasonably old but still open issue in PlotlyJS.jl here:

as well as this discussion

and the suggestion there to consider PlotlyLight for your use-case.

There is also the existing PlotlyBase that “knows how to emit the proper MIME data to display using the jupyterlab plotly renderer” (Remove Blink dependency? · Issue #184 · JuliaPlots/PlotlyJS.jl · GitHub).

1 Like

PlotlyJS has the ability to update existing plots with WebIO (without re-displaying) and use Observables to respond to changes in plots (e.g. hover events, clicks, etc), and its one of the reasons I use PlotlyJS. However, that functionality is not present in PlotlyBase or PlotlyLight.

3 Likes