What Is Dash?

00:00 What is Dash? Dash is an open source framework for building data visualization interfaces. Released in 2017 as a Python library, it’s grown to include implementations for R and Julia.

00:16 Dash helps data scientists build analytical web applications without requiring advanced web development knowledge. Three technologies constitute the core of Dash. Flask supplies the web server functionality, React.js renders the user interface of the web page, and Plotly.js generates the charts used in your application.

00:39 But you don’t have to worry about making all these technologies work together. Dash will do that for you. You just need to write Python, R, or Julia and sprinkle it with a bit of CSS.

00:52 Plotly, a Canada-based company, built Dash and supports its development. You may know the company from the popular graphing libraries that share its name.

01:03 Plotly, the company, open sourced Dash and released it under an MIT license, so you can use Dash at no cost. Plotly also offers a commercial companion to Dash called Dash Enterprise.

01:16 This paid service provides companies with support services such as hosting, deployment, and handling authentication on Dash applications. But these features live outside of Dash’s open source ecosystem, and we won’t be covering them.

01:31 As the name implies, Dash will help you to build dashboards quickly. If you’re used to analyzing data or building data visualizations using Python, then Dash will be a useful addition to your toolbox.

01:43 Here are a few examples of what you can make with Dash. Here, you can see a dashboard to analyze trading positions in real time.

01:56 This is a visualization of millions of Uber rides.

02:02 And here, you can see an interactive financial report.

02:08 This is just a small sample. If you’d like to see other interesting use cases, then go and check the Dash app gallery. It’s important to point out that you don’t need advanced knowledge of web development to follow this course, but some familiarity with HTML and CSS won’t hurt. The rest of this course assumes you know the basics of the following topics: Python graphing libraries, such as Plotly, Bokeh, or Matplotlib; HTML, and the structure of an HTML file; and CSS and style sheets.

02:44 With that introduction to Dash and the prerequisites out of the way, in the next section, you’ll see how to get started with Dash in Python.