Dashing is a Sinatra based framework that lets you build beautiful dashboards.
Note: Dashing is no longer maintained, but still works fine. There is a fork of Dashing (called Smashing) if you prefer a solution that is actively maintained.
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Pros
Pro Comprehensive docs with many examples
The wiki on Dashing's Github page includes many examples and how-to's, e.g. How-to: Add-authentication.
Pro Huge library of widgets available
Dashing has a huge library of user contributed widgets available.
Pro Open source & self-hosted
You don't have to hand over your data to a third-party — you own your data, and you're in full control over the dashboarding system.
Pro Can feed data to widgets directly through Ruby
You can feed data to widgets directly from a Ruby script/app. Dashing uses job scheduling (rufus-scheduler) to update widgets, and it also provides a command to generate a template for jobs: dashing generate job sample_job
. This is convenient if you have an application written in Ruby, or interacts with your data source using Ruby.
Pro Provides an HTTP API for pushing data to dashboard
Dashing provides an HTTP API for pushing data in JSON format to the dashboard. This gives you the ability to wire up your data source in any way you like — the only thing you have to do is POST
the data to your widget's endpoint.
Pro Easy deployments to Heroku
You can deploy Dashing to Heroku easily with a few commands, as documented on How to: Deploy to Heroku of their Github's wiki.
Pro Drag & drop interface for re-arranging widgets
You can re-arrange your dashboard widgets by dragging them around.
Pro Write custom widgets in HTML/ERB, SCSS, and CoffeeScript
Dashing is based on Ruby / Sinatra. Its widgets are essentially a collection of Ruby erb templates for layout, SCSS for styling, and CoffeeScript for data polling/interactivity. If you have worked with Rails, Sinatra, or any other Ruby-based web framework and CoffeeScript, customizing widgets shouldn't be hard.
Cons
Con No longer maintaned
Dashing is no longer maintained by its original creators (Spotify), but it still works as expected. There is an actively maintained fork called Smashing which is identical to Dashing in all aspects.
Con Does not work on IE
Dashing's dashboard does not work on any version of Internet Explorer, even IE Edge, because it relies on Server-sent Events which IE does not implement.
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