Announcing Pytheas

Today, we are excited to bring you Pytheas : web resource and rich UI framework. This piece of software is heavily used at Netflix in building quick prototypes and web applications that explore/visualize large data sets.

Pytheas integrates Guice and Jersey frameworks to wire REST web-service endpoints together with dynamic UI controls in a web application. The framework is designed to support the most common web UI  components needed to build data exploration / dashboard style applications. It not only serves as a quick prototyping tool, but also acts as a foundation for integrating multiple data sources in a single application.

UI components bundle

The UI library bundled with Pytheas is based on a number of Javascript Open Source frameworks such as Bootstrap, JQuery-UI, DataTables, D3 etc. It also contains a number of JQuery plugins that we wrote to support specific use cases that we encountered in building Netflix internal applications/ dashboards. Some of the plugins include support for ajax data driven selection boxes with dynamic filter control, pop-over dialog box form templates, inline portlets, breadcrumbs, loading spinner etc.

Modular Design

An application based on Pytheas framework consists of one or more Pytheas modules. Each module is loosely coupled from each other. The module is responsible for supplying its own data resources and in fact can also provide its own rendering mechanism. Each data resource is a Jersey REST endpoint owned by the module. 

By default Pytheas uses FreeMarker as the rendering template engine for each resource. The framework provide a library of reusable FreeMarker macros that can be embedded in a page to allow for rendering commonly used UI components. Each Pytheas module gets access to all the common page building blocks such as page layout containers, header, footer, navbar etc. which gets embedded by the framework.

Although Pytheas provides FreeMarker as the default template engine, the framework allows for plugging in your own template engine for each module. It'll need to supply its own Jersey Provider with it.

Getting Started

Pytheas project contains a simple helloworld application that serves as a template for building new applications using the framework. Please refer to instructions on how to run helloworld application from a command line.