Bokeh

Bokeh is a data visualization library that allows a developer to code in Python and output JavaScript charts and visuals in web browsers.

Bokeh logo on a dark background.

Why is Bokeh a useful library?

Web browsers are ideal clients for consuming interactive visualizations. However, libraries such as d3.js can be difficult to learn and time consuming to connect to your Python backend web app. Bokeh instead generates the JavaScript for your application while you write all your code in Python. The removal of context switching between the two programming languages can make it easier and faster to create charts and visualizations.

What do Bokeh visualizations look like?

Bokeh can create any type of custom graph or visualization. For example, here is a screenshot of a bar chart created with the figure plot:

Responsive Bokeh bar chart with 64 bars.

For more references, including interactive live demonstrations, check out these sites:

Bokeh resources

Bokeh is under heavy development ahead of the upcoming 1.0 release. Note that while all of the following tutorials are useful, it is possible some of the basic syntax will change as the library's API is not yet stable.

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Matt Makai 2012-2022