Pyqt5/Pyside application with Ipywidgets and Interactive figures

Question

I’m building a GUI (pyqt or pyside) to easily create complex figures (e.g. with plotly) for users. So far so good, I run the data processing and produce plotly figures that are exported as html and read by QwebEngineView. I even created a qt widget for layout editing by the user (see image below).

The problem with this is the long delay (few seconds) in the process of: updating the layout -> exporting to a temp html file → open and rendering the file on GUI. I want to make a better GUI experience with layout editing.

Following this great Jon Mease talk I discovered my plotly figures could be updated in real time using the also great ipywidgets, but only on Jupyter notebooks / lab environment. That is, exporting the widgets+figure to a html file renders all elements, but since the python backend will be lacking for the widgets (in the standalone html file), they won’t interact with the figure’s layout.

However, my application IS running on a python process, so I have the feeling this should be a solvable problem somehow...

Qtconsole won’t render ipywidgets, so I can’t use it to expose my figures in the GUI.

Voila renders Jupyter notebooks with interactive widgets, I’m not sure however if I could access it and incorporate it to the GUI. It says it can work both as a “standalone tornado application” or as a “server extension to notebook or jupyter_server”.

I’m aware there’s probably not a final solution to that, but I would appreciate any suggestions on how to approach this problem! Thanks!

Answer 1

I ended up creating a solution for the problem: QtVoila

It is basically an extended QWebEngineView that manages and renders a Voila process, with some extra functionalities.

Here's a blog post explaining it:
https://www.taufferconsulting.com/portfolio/qtvoila