Hello, and welcome to this week’s blog post for my senior project course. Last week, I worked on the individual design document for my senior project, “Differential Gene Expression Analysis Platform.” I’m responsible for the user interface and web development, one of our project’s functional areas. Previously, I chose R Shiny as the framework for creating our web application. This choice was still tentative, as my team hadn’t yet decided what tools we’d use to develop our web app.
This week, I’m working with my group to create a team design document. After some discussion, we decided that Plotly Dash was a better framework to develop our web app than R Shiny (since Dash can also be written in Python and is better for developing multi-page web apps). Right now, we’re just trying to figure out if we should use Dash or stick with using HTML, Javascript, CSS, and PHP. We want to simplify the web development process as much as possible to focus on the more exciting aspects of our project.
According to the website for Plotly Dash (https://plotly.com/dash/open-source/), you can “use it to build a user interface around your code in an afternoon.” This is appealing for our project because we don’t want to spend extra effort on the web development side of things. We need our web app to interface with R analysis scripts, easy to do with Dash.
Also, Dash is built to be language-agnostic, and we can make our web app in Python. This is great because most of us are more familiar with Python than R, Javascript, or PHP. Another reason I like Dash is that it could make it easier to pursue stretch goals after we fulfill the main goals of our project. Specifically, it would make it easier for my group to implement interactive visualizations or incorporate machine learning. Plotly Dash was designed with interactive visualizations in mind and for creating machine learning web apps.
In the next couple of days, my group will be finalizing our initial design plans for the web app. The web app development framework we choose will likely be a long-term choice since we’d need to rewrite our code if we change our minds later. For that reason, I hope that whatever web app development framework my group chooses will serve us well.
