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Comment by _jplc | Hacker News Reader

How different is this from a Jupyter Notebook? https://jupyter.org/

This seems like a simplified version that could reach it's limit pretty soon.

Very. Evidence is oriented towards data teams who are building and maintaining large reporting and analysis applications for businesses. Jupyter is better suited to one off analysis.

For example:

Access to the underlying web framework (svelte kit) so you can use svelte’s templating (loops, conditionals), css, and (if you want) client side js in your reports

Works with CI/CD out of the box. Deploy to vercel, netlify, your own infra.

SQL, not python, as the main language so your reporting can be maintained and extended by most data analysts.

There’s a lot more we’re working on to extend the differences. Internally we refer to the two buckets as “best of BI” and “best of web frameworks”, if that gives you some indication of where we’re headed.

Here’s another discussion along these lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28305784

Orienting the product to a different audience and therefore changing the defaults is fair enough.

> Jupyter is better suited to one off analysis. > Works with CI/CD out of the box. Deploy to vercel, netlify, your own infra.

Jupyter is suited for whatever you want to do with it. Voila exists to enable the use case of re-generating notebooks on a CI/CD system: https://github.com/voila-dashboards/voila

Anyways, seems like the templating is more powerful than the one being offered by Jupyter Notebooks.

Good luck and much success with it :)

I can't deep dive where I currently am so thought I would drop a question to come back to.

I'm developing a complex business app with SvelteKit which would benefit massively from integrated reports and widgets. Is there a way I can easily utilise this to drop the resulting output directly into my own Svelte pages?

It's easy to embed a production Evidence site into other apps/sites (can use an iframe), but it's a bit trickier to get that working behind auth.

We can help you figure out if it's feasible - let me know and we can set up some time to chat: sean at evidence.dev

Businesses generate automated reports. Sometimes these reports are generated with jupyter itself, but the purpose is consumption, not analysis. Jupyter reports are fugly. This works without jupyter, and gives you interactivity.

It looks a bit like a notebook, but the output of an Evidence project is a static site, so you can build a data product that takes advantage of web features like click-based navigation. Queries and pages are built once at build time, so production projects are very fast. Here's an example project from one of our open source community members: https://mdsinabox.com/

There's Voilà for Jupyter Notebooks, that does exactly that: https://github.com/voila-dashboards/voila

Having just tried out Voila, I do think these products are serving pretty different audiences on the front end.

When I open examples in the Voila gallery, it spends 15s or so building the site, which a dev may tolerate, but a business exec has already given up on.

One of the benefits of a static site for reporting use cases is that it’s just HTML and JS. It loads virtually instantly as it doesn’t hit a database - all the data is shipped with the site.

Open it on your phone when you wake up, in a cab, by the gate at the airport: you’re looking at a mobile optimized site, and 5s later you can finish writing that email with the datapoint you needed.

because its just markdown and SQL without all the other overhead.

I guess that where you see overhead I see options.

Well yeah, sure. That's the difference, it has less options and complexity than a notebook. This is simpler - that's a valid reason for it to exist.

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