ColabComponent

A React.js inspired Component for building a simple reactive UI in Google Colaboratory.

Why?

Sometimes there is some manual work that has to be done with your data. Instead of building a custom desktop app, why not do so in Colab?

I built this component inspired by the react framework, which provides in my opinion the best tools for quick prototype-like development ideal for custom data exploring and data analysis tools.

How?

The google.colab package offers an interface to run python functions in the output. Combine that with the fact that python notebooks can render full on HTML and you can build UIs using python, HTML, css and javascript!

Install

In a cell run:

!pip3 install ColabComponent

All the required dependencies are installed in the enviroment provided by google.

How to use?

The package utilises Object-Oriented inheritance and is based around the basic class Component.

Component API

property name	type	description	overridable
render	method	the basic method, where the ui and effects are defined	☑
component_did_mount	method	a hook that is called, when the component is mounted	☑
component_did_update	method	a hook that is called, when the component is updated	☑
display	method	run to display the component	☒
register_effect	method	registers a python function such that it can be used within the HTML code	☒
state	dict	holds the info about the state of the component	☒
set_state	method	the preferred way of updating the component state	☒

Example

from ColabComponent import Component

class Counter(Component):
  def __init__(self):
    super().__init__()
    self.state = {
        'number': 1
    }

    self.use_add = self.register_effect('add', self.add)

  def render(self):
    return f'''
      <h1>{self.state['number']}</h1>
      <button onclick="{self.use_add()}">+1</button>
    '''

  def component_did_mount(self):
    print('mounted')

  def component_did_update(self):
    print('updated')

  def add(self):
    self.set_state({
        'number': self.state['number'] + 1
    })

Counter().display()

Effect