Vision

Bokeh is a Python interactive visualization library that targets modern web browsers for presentation. Its goal is to provide elegant, concise construction of basic exploratory and advanced custom graphics in the style of D3, but also deliver this capability with high-performance interactivity over very large or streaming datasets. Bokeh should help anyone who would like to quickly and easily create interactive plots, dashboards, and data applications.

Areas of Work

The development pace of Bokeh is contigent on external funding opportunities, so instead of a traditional “roadmap” with specific dates and deadlines, we present the major areas of work the Core Team considers important. These are tasks and projects that we would like to do ourselves, when time and resources permit, or that we would be happy to have done by new contributors.

Improvements to Layout

Bokeh has a built in layout system that is suitable for simple use cases. There are still currently use-cases that do not function well or properly. We would like to make Bokeh’s layout system more robust, simpler, faster, and applicable as widely as possible, while demonstrating alternative options using external layout libraries for more sophisticated use cases.

Use WebGL Throughout

Bokeh currently can use WebGL to accelerate plotting for larger datasets in some limited situations. In addition to not fully supporting all use-cases, the internal cost is having to maintain two separate code paths. It would be desirable to convert all of Bokeh’s rendering to use WebGL (possibly via a higher level library such as ReGL) so that better performance for larger data sets is always available, and to streamline maintenance for the future.

Develop BokehJS as a first-class JavaScript library

By and large none of the core contributors have been JS or front-end experts, and for some time the client side BokehJS library was an implementation detail. There is more interest to use BokehJS directly, and with attention from experienced front-end JS developers, BokehJS could integrate better with existing common web frameworks and tools than it currently does. This includes making much more accessible documentation for BokehJS itself. These improvements would also help increase the potential pool of core developers interested in maintaining BokehJS over the long run.

Better Theming Support

Bokeh currently has some minimal theming ability, that can specify properties for types. It would be useful to have more targets and sophisticated ways to theme individual objects, or collections of objects. Additionally some work is needed to improve or create visual assets that work with different themes, and to make DOM elements easily themeable as well.

Visual Design improvements

Bokeh has never had the benefit of any dedicated web or visual designers, and this is one area where it suffers compared to some other projects. Visually, it looks much less “designed by engineers” than it used to, there is still much room for improvement. Another idea, if Better Theming Support is accomplished is to have visual designers help create a set of attractive themes that can be immediately available to users.

Smooth Animations and Transitions

Some users have expressed interest in the ability to make different views of a plot transform smoothly from one state to another. (Compare to “tween” animations in R/GGplot). This would afford the ability to create visually attractive “data stories” by scripting smooth transitions that connect one view of data to another.

Simple RPC mechanism

Bokeh currently allows for users to execute JavaScript code or Python code in response to data changes or various UI events. Some users have requests a more direct “simple remote procedure” capability that would enable them to e.g. execute a JavaScript function directly from Python in a Bokeh server application or vice versa.

Technical Writing Assistance

The Bokeh documentation has grown quite large and has much information, but it seems to be the case that many users still have difficulty finding the appropriate documentation or examples, even when they exist. The project would benefit greatly from experienced help to organize the information architecture of the docs, point out missing areas, etc.

Built-in LaTeX / MathText support

Bokeh can display mathematical symbols and formulas by creating and using custom extensions. Users have expressed a desire for this capability to be more directly integrated, e.g to draw math text for axis or tick labels, wihtout needing to resort to a custom extension.

Selection and Hover

Bokeh supports various sorts of hit testing for selection and hover on a per-glyph basis. It would be good to make support more uniform by adding the requisite hit testing wherever it is currently missing. Additionally Bokeh needs a policy-based mechanism for dealing with “multiple hits” i.e. if the mouse hovers over 50 points, a way to show just one, or just the top N, or even some aggregation or summary as the hover.

Namespace Variables

It would be very useful for users to be able to synchronize and manipulate arbitrary data / variables across the Bokeh/BokehJS boundary. Currently only DataSource columns and defined properties are available.