Different audiences require different displays of data and analyses. LIVE Environments allow for the same underlying data infrastructure and visualizations to be remixed into simple interactive visualizations, fixed-layout dashboards, or full featured enivornments for exploratory data analysis.
🪐 With Solara, complex UIs can be quickly created out of LIVE components and served as standalone websites.
🌎 LIVE Components can be used to create dashboards showing a few different views of a fixed number of datasets. These can be created directly in Jupyter Lab and shared with Voilà.
🪐 Several of the Jupyter-based LIVE components have roots in the Jdaviz system created by NASA for visualization of data from the James Webb Space Telescope, using the glue codebase.
To learn more about Jdaviz, which can be used to build dashboards OR as components within Jupyter environments, see the Jdaviz read-the-docs site or this quick summary of the software's origins on the 10QViz blog.
The combination of GUI tools with command-line interactions and scripting can be immensely powerful. By integrating with Jupyter tools, LIVE Environments support the blending of these two interaction modes. Researchers can seamlessly hop back and forth between the two modes, choosing the right tool for the job. Embedding interactive visualizations in Jupyter contexts also provides an excellent environment for tutorials and training material.
LIVE Environment viewers are Jupyter widgets and embed within Jupyter Lab/Notebooks, allowing users to interact with visualizations from the command line or the graphical user interface.
Not every LIVE user will be satisfied with a combination of LIVE components created before. A key tenet of the LIVE approach is "composability," in that even users not interested in coding should be able to configure a LIVE environment that suits them.
CUSTOMIZABLE COMPLEXITY
An excellent analogy for the LIVE approach to composability is the "Snap Circuits" system that allow childrens (and adults!) to create all manner of electronic devices using a set of re-purposable components, "snapped" on to a plastic substrate. One can think of the LIVE system's core technologies as a very fancy "plastic substrate" for the re-purposable visualization and domain-specific tools that form the rest of the LIVE environments.
TEMPLATES
Another example that resonates with some users is to imagine the usage of LIVE environments as analogous to opening up Microsoft Word & either dismissing all templates to start with a "blank" document, opening up a template that's a great parallel for what you'd like to do, or making your own template that you'll want to use again of share with others.
In this analogy, the original version of glue in Qt, or in a Jupyter notebook is akin to a "blank document" (although the latter is more like LaTeX than MSWD!). The templates in MSWD are similar to the dashboard options shown above--and they can of course be customized, just like the MSWD templates can.
