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Cyclotron: A web application for constructing dashboards
- omouse 10y agoI never understand why people choose MIT when they create something valuable and don't go for AGPL or GPL. Looks good though :D
- nathancahill 10y agoMaybe they want people to actually use it.
- dom0 10y agoBecause Software like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Typo3 and so on isn't used?
- aseipp 10y agoPointing out that a lot of internet runs, in part, thanks to millions of lines of GPL code that people reuse and extend on a daily basis? Well, it isn't allowed, I'm afraid. It breaks the narrative that the GPL is old and busted garbage, you see, and we can't have that going on in these parts. Consider yourself persona non grata #1 with that attitude! It's very simple. It would mean my soapbox wouldn't feel so tall when I speak, and that when I take other peoples code, I might, some day, actually have to give something back as a result. As opposed to just taking it, profiting off it (like ~80% of people who 'eschew' the GPL because they can't make as much money as possible off it) and never doing anything in return. As I'm sure you can understand, those consequences would be utterly devastating. For me. I hope you can fully empathize with my plight, so we can reach a mutual understanding. Preferably in the form of you giving me things with no strings attached.
- cr0sh 10y ago> As opposed to just taking it, profiting off it (like ~90% of people who 'eschew' the GPL because they can't make as much money as possible off it) and never doing anything in return. This right here - though I would extend it to also mention those who take it, extend it, profit off of it, then next-to-never (and many times never) returning any of those changes back to the community. If we're lucky, they contribute something else back (and those contributions are welcomed, mostly) - but never the changes which allowed them to grow and expand well beyond anyone's expectations. We all know who you are. I understand the want to see my code used by "the big guys" (or the "up-and-comers" who become "the big guys"); it does look good on one's CV. At the same time, I also understand Stallman's reasonings and message; he has personal experiences which led to the creation of the GPL and his philosophy on software - and he has been around long enough to see how the corporate world really works when it comes to the lifecycle of software. From the birth of an application or system, to its use and adoption, to its death. Sometimes, its the latter end-of-life phase that we seem to forget about. So often as developers we have to "re-invent the wheel" when had old proprietary software source code been released at EOL, a base to build something better would be in place. Unfortunately, then as now, software has been looked on as an "asset" to be traded and sold for profit, despite the fact that it also depreciates faster than a new car. Yet, like an old Vega, some desperately cling onto that old software hoping to profit "someday, you'll see!". And in many cases, that source code, and even the binaries - suffers the ignoble fate of "bit rot", sitting in a warehouse on an old hard drive (if we're lucky - if not, it's on some old nearly unreadable 7-bit paper tape literally rotting away, in a format used by a computer system that hasn't been turned on - if one even exists and hasn't been scrapped for gold - in over 50 years). Original symbolics LISP? Some of the code behind the Apollo program (heck, and that was government funded!)? Cray Research operating systems, compilers, libraries, etc - for the old Cray supercomputers? This list could be extended nearly forever. The sad thing is, we have lost man-centuries of work in the form of software, due to want-of-profit and bit-rot - and Stallman knows this - we should all know this. Furthermore, even when the code does survive (in whatever form), inevitably, the systems that can run it do not (in general); in some cases, it has become impossible to run code written for certain machines because no examples of those machines, nor their designs (to create an emulator) exist any longer. All we can do is guess at what the program should do (assuming we have at least documentation of the mnemonics and opcodes for the machine language binary to reverse engineer - if you don't have that, nor the real hardware, the binary code might as well be noise). Crazy enough - in some cases we have the machine and the software extant - but only one operating copy of that machine! For example, there's a company in Texas which uses an old IBM accounting machine to this day; it uses punched-cards for it's data input/output, plus it has a printer. It's "programs" are hard-wired plugboards. A computer history museum delegation has begged them to donate the system to a museum for preservation, as it is the last operating example of such a system. But the company has an attitude of "if it ain't broke, why fix it" - and you can't fault them for that. Even so, one day it will break, and likely whomever is in charge will decide to sell it for scrap rather than donate it (due to likely amount of precious metals in the machine) - and that machine, plus all of its programs - will be lost forever. Heck - we treat our automobiles and automotive history with greater respect, and that has had arguably a much lesser impact over the last 100 years, than what computer technology has had over the last 20. /end ranting (and book)
- pc86 10y agoBecause MIT is simpler? Because MIT doesn't require any specific license usage in the future?
- thomasfedb 10y agoI use MIT because I want others to use my code. That's all I want for my code. It's a gift. MIT is user-friendly (read: less restrictive).
- kbumsik 10y agoBecause people these days want to use open source codes freely, without bothering with License. And people who open projects wants their project more widely used. GPL is too restrictive for new projects.
- cr0sh 10y agoAll the GPL says, at it's basic core, is that if you incorporate the source code of the software into your source code, you must provide a means for others to get a copy of that extended source code, and they must adhere by the GPL license as well. In other words, if you GPL license your code, and someone else uses it, they need to "pass it on" - in other words, their payment to you (and the community) for using your code is for their changes to be passed back to you (and the community). Code paid for with more code - imagine that. The only restriction is against those who seek to profit (almost) exclusively off the source code, in perpetuity. They want their cake, and to eat as well. The MIT and other similar licenses allow this - they get to take the code, extend it, profit off of it, and never give back the changes that made the system better (and arguably forked it). And if you're lucky, you get mentioned down at the bottom of a copyright/license agreement in 4pt font that's barely readable.
- stephenr 10y agoIf you 'incorporate' a piece of GPL code into your program, you're either dynamically or statically linking to it - which the FSF considers to be make your work 'derivative' and thus you would be required to license your own work under the GPL, regardless of whether you had made any changes to the original GPL code you make use of or not.
- cr0sh 10y agoOf course - that's a feature of the GPL - not a bug.
- CamperBob2 10y ago"It only works if everybody does it" is not a feature or a bug, but a recipe for irrelevance at best and coercion at worst.
- ohstopitu 10y agoSince we are talking about licenses, is there a license that is as permissive as MIT but one that requires you to give credit for your work?
- detaro 10y agoWhat do you mean by "give credit"? You have to name the original author with MIT somewhere: <snip> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. </snip>
- ohstopitu 10y agobasically, what I would like is a license that's basically like MIT...but I would want my name + email + tool be listed in the about / licences section of anything created / used with my tools/projects etc.
- chris_7 10y agoAlso, is there a license that prohibits giving credit, but is otherwise as permissive?
- oftenwrong 10y agoYou may create a A/GPL fork of the project if you wish.
- flukus 10y agoI'm all for the GPL, but I still don't understand the licensing and how exactly things work through various linking scenarios. It seems to be a question that if asked 5 times you'll get 7 answers.
- rmanalan 10y agoThere's also http://atlasboard.bitbucket.org/ http://atlasboard.bitbucket.org/
- mxuribe 10y agoThis seems pretty cool. Though running it as an intrAnet app is unexpected.
- mwexler 10y agoThough in many corporate settings, that's where you'd expect to see it. Many externally facing dash frameworks require too many dependencies; this one went lighter in some ways b/c they assume that it's behind a wall and in a trusted environment. http://www.cyclotron.io/faq.html http://www.cyclotron.io/faq.html: "Can I Use Cyclotron to Host Dashboards on the Internet? It is not recommended to deploy Cyclotron as-is in a public setting. Cyclotron was designed to be used in a corporate intranet environment, rather than for public dashboards. In addition, it's possible to create malicious dashboards using the extensibility features of Cyclotron. Allowing untrustworthy users to create dashboards is not recommended."
- wrkronmiller 10y agoHow does this compare to something like Grafana? https://github.com/grafana/grafana https://github.com/grafana/grafana
- jester23947 10y agoI really like grafana
- weego 10y agoCan I just take a moment, and I apologise up front for singling you out for this one, to say how much I hate comments like this, even more that they get upvoted. There's always some arbitrary software mentioned that is often barely related even tangentially and expect someone else to reply with the info. If you want to know how it differs, YOU look it up and if the outcome of that research is interesting enough YOU post it. Don't expect other people to do it for you, or worse, make it so that the creator of something that might not even be the one linking it feels like they have to justify why they open sourced something.
- joneholland 10y agoI don't think this is fair criticism. Grafana is an exact competitor to this, and as the market leader, it's only natural to be the benchmark.
- ausjke 10y agono I like these short posts too, even though with more info it will be more helpful. Providing related links is still useful, it took me less than one minute to check out quickly. Thanks.
- hacktothefuture 10y agoI agree with you! This is how I found VueJS when someone made a similar, tangentially related post which was essentially, "Yea but I like VueJS much better for reason x". It exposed me to something I didn't know about.
- StavrosK 10y agoWhy MongoDB for what is pretty much a front-end :( What's wrong with SQLite?
- Terretta 10y agoMore front-endy, see Dashing, now Smashing, a Sinatra based framework that lets you build beautiful dashboards. https://github.com/SmashingDashboard/smashing/wiki https://github.com/SmashingDashboard/smashing/wiki You can store models in SQLite: https://github.com/SmashingDashboard/smashing/wiki/How-To%3A-Define-a-data-model-and-store-history-data-to-database https://github.com/SmashingDashboard/smashing/wiki/How-To%3A...
- dom0 10y ago"The path of MongoDB is often the same: first the primary DB, then the configuration store, then it's finally removed" - (friend of mine)
- 77pt77 10y agoSolving imaginary scaling issues at scale. http://img.pandawhale.com/post-73940-Solving-Imaginary-Scaling-Issu-FA3D.jpeg http://img.pandawhale.com/post-73940-Solving-Imaginary-Scali...
- wehadfun 10y agoExpand. MongoDB is finally removed? Why?
- shawabawa3 10y agoI think the implication is that mongo is picked because it's "cool", and eventually everyone realises another tool does the job better (e.g. regular sql database/redis/sqlite/etc)
- brettmiller 10y agoI was the eng manager when we started this project... so why Mongo? - baumandm suggested Mongo and it seemed to meet all of our requirements. - We started the project in May 2013. Mongo was a lighter weight / simpler solution back then. - We were building dashboards for monitoring systems (like grafana) and we wanted high availability of our data store. - The dashboards are defined with a single JSON document, but the JSON is dynamic for every dashboard. I'm no longer involved in the project, but Mongo is probably still a good choice.
- orenbarzilai 10y agoThere is also Redash http://docs.redash.io/en/latest/ http://docs.redash.io/en/latest/ We are using it and it's awesome.
- mrkmcknz 10y agoThere seems to be a plethora of these open source dashboard builder systems. I just want to pay for a hosted version that isn't going to be $1k monthly and require me to build "plugins" to do something that is akin to an API call.
- dkural 10y agoI want it to be a $1K/m so they can stay in business and build a sustainable thing I won't have to replace. That's still way cheaper than spending 1/4th of an engineers time per year on an open source dashboard.
- intrasight 10y agoIn a business/enterprise context, why not use Power BI?
- doublerebel 10y agoI've considered offering a hosted version of Godot2/Riemann+dash. What would be your main data sources? Would you pay $100/mo?
- cultureulterior 10y agoLibrato. Unfortunately, their free offering has stopped, even though that was my main way of converting people into using them
- Mahn 10y agoInfluxDB + Grafana is a super easy combo to set up (two binaries, no dependencies) and it's very low maintenance once it's up. If you are looking for something that's both affordable and hassle free it's a pretty good alternative, even if self-hosted.
- dmartinez 10y agoMicrosoft Power BI [0] is only $10 per user per month, while Amazon Quicksight [1] is $9 per user per month. In the startup space, there is also Mode [2] which has reasonable starting pricing at $25 per user per month. I've used all three, and my personal favorite is Power BI. They are all great though. [0] https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/?b=1 https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/?b=1 [1] https://quicksight.aws/pricing/ https://quicksight.aws/pricing/ [2] https://about.modeanalytics.com/pricing/ https://about.modeanalytics.com/pricing/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- calimac 10y agoBrilliant, beautiful, open and supported by heavy horsepower.
- agentgt 10y agoI would like to share some thoughts on this based on experience of being a crusty old enterprise developer. The dashboard problem keeps coming back. I think the time might be finally coming for some dashboard framework to actually succeed. A dashboard framework has been tried many many times. Here are some old ones just on the top of my head: * Shindig aka OpenSocial aka Google Gadgets * J2EE portlets * OpenUSS I'm not sure why Shindig aka Google Gadgets failed but one of the complaint we had on a product that I helped build that used Shindig is that business users did not want the complexity of customizing a dashboard. That is hard coded panels were good enough. I guess just like many tech stuff (slack/irc, wiki) the timing and execution just wasn't right. I think now that might change given the plethora of devops, data driven biz, and generally improvement in tech awareness. It would be nice if Cyclotron had some sort of spec (particularly language agnostic) but I guess that failed hard for the above. For my own small company we use Kibana (the old one that doesn't require NodeJS), Grafana, and Jenkins. Yes we use Jenkins as a dashboard. Jenkins is actually shockingly a good place for a dashboard because every time we build/deploy or kick off some kind of job we see the current status of stuff. I'm not sure why cloudbees hasn't taken advantage of this. I honestly think it is the best place to put devopsy like dashboards. The other nice thing about Jenkins besides it actually kicking things off is the notification. IMO notification is almost more important and more useful than dashboards. The two should be not be far apart but for some reason in most systems they are.
- oblio 10y agoJenkins: the duct tape and WD40 of software automation.
- firewalkwithme 10y agoAmen
- manyxcxi 10y agoI have seen people use it in some amazingly Rube Goldbergian ways for great success. It's a real credit to the project and the ecosystem. Easy enough to 'just get the thing done', but as complex as you want it to be.
- ape4 10y agoForgive my ignorance... what makes a dashboard different that a regular webapp?
- vomitcuddle 10y agoA dashboard is a web app displaying aggregate data - usually on something like a digital signage display at a company's office - often includes 'vanity metrics' like web traffic data, Git commits, social media feeds, CI builds, etc.
- jldugger 10y agoTo expand upon that, it's aggregating a variety of data sources, generally via disparate APIs, rather than creating its own database backed API. So while most framework models are oriented around their own ORM, a dashboard is probably better off modeling a set of translators, and providing tools for adding new translators. Translators can take a random API, and convert into a normalized data type the rest of the framework can understand. And a good community will have a lot of these translators available. Additionally, the dashboard framework can provide a variety of standard visualizations for the translators to send normalized data. Time series, histogram, pie chart, text, etc. And provide an intelligent layout engine for arranging a collection of these on a screen. Dashing, for example, allows a user to re-arrange dashlets. tl;dr -- it _is_ a webapp, but the more limited scope allows for better tooling and your valuable engineers can focus the more productive uses of their time, like writing new visualizations or, more likely, new translators.
- nkg 10y agoThat name may have a negative ring, as a cyclotron is also a cancer imaging device : https://www.mskcc.org/blog/how-new-particle-accelerator-will-make-imaging-and-treatment-more-precise https://www.mskcc.org/blog/how-new-particle-accelerator-will...
- keyboardmasher 10y agoCyclotron: http://swatkats.info/encyclopedia/entries/cyclotron http://swatkats.info/encyclopedia/entries/cyclotron
- nkg 10y agoXD Megatron, anyone ?
- ambrop7 10y agoTechnically speaking, a cyclotron is just a type of particle accelerator. In medicine I suppose it can imply something more specific (PET imaging but also proton therapy).
- ndubuka 10y agoNice product
- hackcrafter 10y agoLooks like a hosted equivalent of GeckoBoard[0], which I have used successfully for uptime and key metric boards that are displayed in common room dedicated TV screens etc. One key is getting decent render performance on low-spec hardware (i.e. a Rasberry Pi). Not something you usually think about when building/evaluating a web app, but those low-spec "boxes" crawl on most modern web-sites. Yet there shouldn't be any reason why a dashboard couldn't be rendered on them! I wonder how Cyclotron performs with it's JS heavy front-end on those types of dedicated dashboard devices? [0] https://www.geckoboard.com/ https://www.geckoboard.com/
- brettmiller 10y agoThe first use case for Cyclotron was cycling through a few static web pages on dedicated TV screens. Cyclotron is still used to display dashboards all around Expedia - some teams use it more than others.
- fiatjaf 10y agoThere is also https://mondash.org/ https://mondash.org/, which is has a clever API that may be very useful in some cases.
- ndubuka 10y agoThanks for project
- wiremine 10y agoNice! Some quick feedback: * I'd default to the "light" theme, especially if you're presenting it against dark background. It will highlight the content better. * You could use some whitespace between the widget titles and the content. The text is sliding into the graphs. * Might be nice to use more than two colors for the graph content, or at least make one of them different from black, which is also the color used used for the tables and titles.
- SEJeff 10y agoIt requires mongodb to run, eeeewwww: http://www.cyclotron.io/faq.html#without-mongodb http://www.cyclotron.io/faq.html#without-mongodb Not something I'd trust as a primary datastore.
- mrcactu5 10y agoI like how you can change the Cascading Style Sheets pretty much on the click of a button. I am a bit behind the time, but I do remember Square's Cube to be good for time-series. https://github.com/square/cube https://github.com/square/cube Those can be embedded into dashboards
- zorbash 10y agoTo be honest I don't understand why should a dashboard framework need MongoDB to display widgets from external sources. [shameless plug] We're also building an open-source dashboards framework https://github.com/kittoframework/kitto https://github.com/kittoframework/kitto
- jenhsun 10y agoAnyone know Baidu's echarts? http://ecomfe.github.io/echarts/index-en.html http://ecomfe.github.io/echarts/index-en.html
- _ao789 10y agoHow is this different from potential alternatives like Geckoboard, Ducksboard and all those? Is it essentially not just another one?
- ambrop7 10y agoI find the name slightly disrespective of people who develop and work with actual cyclotrons (particle accelerators). How is their application related to cyclotrons?
- dnprock 10y agoThis scared me a little bit. We've been doing a similar product https://vida.io https://vida.io. I think we've got a lot further with many components and dashboards, see https://vida.io/explore https://vida.io/explore. At the same time, I'm pretty excited to see someone has similar vision about custom data visualizations.
- smrtinsert 10y agowhat about openmct. iirc it was a complete dashboarding tool.
- tlrobinson 10y agoDisclaimer: I work on Metabase. Another open source option: Metabase http://www.metabase.com/ http://www.metabase.com/ We support most SQL databases and a bunch of others, plus upcoming support for Google Analytics.
- based2 10y agohttp://zeppelin.apache.org/ http://zeppelin.apache.org/
- Redsquare 10y agoAirbnb have a decent os dash https://github.com/airbnb/superset/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/airbnb/superset/blob/master/README.md
- brettmiller 10y agoHere are a few features that are unique to Cyclotron AFAIK: - It can be used to create business quality reports / dashboards that can be exported to PDF. - Internally we use a few custom data tools that make the process of getting data to a dashboard (securely) a breeze. Unfortunately, they're not open source, but it's a big differentiator. - Versioning: See what changed from one version to the next, roll back to a previous version, or just view older versions. - Environments: Have a dev, test, and prod environment? With one click you can deploy it to another environment. Deploy too soon? Feel free to roll back. - Really good documentation: You'll need to have it install to view as it's not on the cyclotron.io site. But it's strait-forward to read the code: https://github.com/ExpediaInceCommercePlatform/cyclotron/tree/master/cyclotron-site/app/partials/help https://github.com/ExpediaInceCommercePlatform/cyclotron/tre...
- kfk 10y agoOn a side note, any site like HN for data systems, BI, dashboards? Edit. To be clear I mean forums where business intelligence, data science, dashboard folks hang out. I work with Tableau and they have a big community, I am looking for sites less tableau centric...
- wickedgain 10y agoWhat do you mean exactly?