* Solara will not continuously re-execute your script as Streamlit does.
* Solara will re-execute components instead, only what needs to.
* State in Solara is separate from the UI components, unlike streamlit, where they are strongly linked.
* State can be on the application level (global) for simplicity or on the component level (local) for creating reusable components.
* Solara should not block the render loop. Long-running functions should be executed in a thread using use_thread.
It can be used for general purposes, but we focus on the data science landscape. However, our main website is built using solara, and we know a few startups using solara for their main product (public-facing, not internal).
We (the authors of the Solara web app framework) were inspired by the OpenAI keynote Wanderlust app they demoed and rebuilt it in Python using Solara.
It would be good to showcase our framework's power and inspire others to build UI's with AI/LLM elements in it.
In Solara you can dynamically put together the UI like in react, in pynecone you need to use their primitives to make lists and conditional rendering.
Also, state management is not tied to solara, but could use dataclasses or pydantic, wrapped in a reactive variable.
I think what sets Solara apart from the rest is that we use a 10 year proven paradigm, React, but on the Python side, although with a more Pythonic API.
For instance making reusable components in Python is a real benefit.
Pynecone uses ReactJS in the front end, but on the Python side it’s their own API.
I do like pynecone, their API is pretty. I do wonder with many of these frameworks. Does the paradigm works for more complex apps, or does it end in complexity hell once you go past the hello world examples. At least React has proven itself.
Co-creator of Voila here. Voila is rather un-opinionated about what you can run in it. While it offers excellent support for ipywidgets, it's certainly not confined to that. One downside of Voila is that it can be resource-intensive, as it creates a new kernel/process for each page view or browser tab.
Mercury, in my view, seems really interesting for quick demos and reports. It's somewhat akin to Streamlit, making it ideal for notebook authors.
On the other end of the spectrum (and pardon my shameless plug here), there's Solara (https://github.com/widgetti/solara/). Solara is a fully-fledged web framework for Python, specifically designed to handle app sizes that surpass what Streamlit and Dash can manage. It's worth noting that Solara can render ipywidgets, using a pure Python React-like framework. This can be particularly useful after the exploration phase, when you're looking to transition a project from the notebook into production.
We're excited to introduce Solara: A pure Python web framework built for large, complex apps.
While there are many Python web frameworks out there, most are designed for small data apps or use paradigms unproven for larger scale. Code organization, reusability, and state tend to suffer as apps grow in complexity, resulting in either spaghetti code or offloading to a React application.
Solara addresses this gap. Using a React-like API, we don't need to worry about scalability. React has already proven its ability to support the world's largest web apps.
Solara uses a pure Python implementation of React (Reacton), creating ipywidget-based applications. These apps work both inside the Jupyter Notebook and as standalone web apps with frameworks like FastAPI. This paradigm enables component-based code and incredibly simple state management.
By building on top of ipywidgets, we automatically leverage an existing ecosystem of widgets and run on many platforms, including JupyterLab, Jupyter Notebook, Voilà, Google Colab, DataBricks, JetBrains Datalore, and more.
AFAIK Modin tries to be the API compatible with Pandas, but then faster/distributed.
Vaex tries to be a DataFrame library that is as fast as possible on a single machine to keep things simple and fast (although distributed is on the horizon, we don't need it currently). We're not afraid to break compatibility with pandas, because we care about performance.
Both libraries try to hide the laziness from the user.