Taipy - a web app development tool for Python

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This week I found on Packt Publishing's site, a new title set for October release that covers a Python library call Taipy. Its being touted as a tool for Data Scientists to translate their insights, visuals and explorations into user friendly applications that allows others outside the data science area to use and answer real-world questions. 

From my experience in business intelligence, this tends to be a genuine problem. At one company I worked for we have an outside consultant work on exploring data around inventory shrinkage. While the work was well-done, it wasn't something that could be easily handed off to non-IT people to use and explore, which limited its use. Even using something like Jupyter Notebooks was often too much effort for the non-technical staff who needed the information. 

There are other toolkits available like Tableau and Power BI that are more user friendly, but translating data science projects like this into those applications is not often easy. A tool that would allow a data scientist to move their code into a reusable webapp with a minimum of effort seems like something that could be extremely beneficial.

So with my interest piqued I started playing with Taipy. First a couple of caveats:

  • Taipy only supports Python version 3.9 through 3.12
  • Its not included in the Anaconda package repositories

Both those can be preceded by "currently". 

I installed Python 3.12.10 in place of Anaconda and with a quick PIP command, installed the Taipy library. The website and GitHub repository have a couple of very easy tutorial apps to try out. One is a basic demo app that shows off some of the interactivity of the library. The second  is a more fully implemented website that lets you filter the sample sales data by date, category and subcategory. 

There is a code stub included that appears to be a starter to implement some basic security for access. 


Looking at the GitHub repository, there is code for authentication, although a walkthrough isn't provided (currently). I downloaded the code, but its not working. It errors with 

"ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'taipy.auth'"

Looking at the module list - there is no auth function, so that's likely the issue. I'll keep an eye on this library as I think its worthwhile and it can fill a needed niche going forward to see if the issue is resolved soon.

Doing a little more research, it appears the authentication module is part of a Pro version of this library. Check out the Pricing page for more info.

Meanwhile, if you are interested, please download the library and experiment. The code needed to implement a webapp is straightforward. Here is an example I worked on that generates a version of the typical Hello World programming app.

import taipy.gui.builder as tgb
from taipy.gui import Gui

with tgb.Page() as hello_taipy_tester:
    tgb.text("# Hello, Taipy Tester!", mode="md")

page_to_run = Gui(page=hello_taipy_tester)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    page_to_run.run(use_reloader=True, dark_mode=True)


Interestingly, there is a Visual Studio Code plugin as well called Taipy Studio. 







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