Welcome to Chartlets

Chartlets is a software framework that allows websites developed with React to be extended by server-side widgets programmed in Python or other programming languages.

It comprises a Python backend package and a JavaScript/React frontend package.

Features

• Enhance your React web application by UI-contributions programmed in Python
• Enhance your (Python) web API to serve server-side UI-contributions.
• Uses Material UI components and Vega-Lite charts.

How it works

Users write the widgets in, e.g. Python, and a REST server implements three endpoints to publish the widgets:

• GET /contributions: Called once after application UI starts up. Returns an object whose keys are contribution points (e.g., "panels") and whose values are arrays of contribution objects.
• POST /layout/{contribPoint}/{contribIndex}: Called once for every contribution when it becomes visible in the UI. Returns the contribution's initial component tree.
• POST /callback: Called when users interact with the component tree or on application state changes. Returns an array of contribution changes where each contribution change contains an array of actions to be applied to the component tree.

The following sequence diagram depicts how the library is supposed to work. The top shows the JavaScript frontend that uses this library. The bottom shows the lifeline of the backend REST server.