App-solutely Fabulous: A Data Scientist’s Guide to Choosing Python Web Tools Wisely

Who am I?

Data Scientists in R love Shiny

Python has many more options

Too many options

Try (some of) them!

Server vs. Serverless

• The computations need to happen somewhere - Python or R needs to be installed somewhere
  • You probably want to share your app with someone, and they need to be able to run it
• If you see “localhost:8000”, then all the computations are happening locally - so sending the file won’t help unless they have all the data and packages
• In-browser versions can often be a good option if you don’t have a ton of data
  • BE CAREFUL ABOUT YOUR PASSWORDS AND API KEYS

Streamlit

Streamlit - 😃

• Lots of elements to use
  • New ones all the time
• Very Pythonic
  • Simple to transition from script

Streamlit - 🫤

• Runs top to bottom - not at all reactive
  • Has caching, but it gets confusing very quickly
• Can get very slow if it gets big
• All Streamlit apps kinda look the same
  • Hard to tweak UI

Streamlit

Streamlit-Lite

• Stlite

  • Not officially supported by Streamlit

• Pretty easy interface to copy your Streamlit apps

• I couldn’t figure out how to do streaming

• Slower to load, slower to run

• Link: In-Browser Streamlit

Gradio

Gradio - 😃

• Very focused on ML
• Even simpler than Streamlit
• Built in interfaces for Chat
• Had reactive blocks

Gradio - 🫤

• Less flexible than Streamlit
  • Complicated to do multiple things at once
• All Gradio apps look the same – even more so than Streamlit
• Fewer components available
  • Sometimes need to use HTML to do what you want