Smashing is a fork of Dashing (which is no longer maintained), a Sinatra based framework that lets you build beautiful dashboards.
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Pros
Pro Huge library of widgets available
Smashing 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 Comprehensive docs with many examples
The wiki on Smashing's Github page includes many examples and how-to's, e.g. How-to: Add-authentication.
Pro Write custom widgets in HTML/ERB, SCSS, and CoffeeScript
Smashing 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.
Pro Drag & drop interface for re-arranging widgets
You can re-arrange your dashboard widgets by dragging them around.
Pro Easy deployments to Heroku
You can deploy Smashing to Heroku easily with a few commands, as documented on How to: Deploy to Heroku of their Github's wiki.
Pro Can feed data to widgets directly through Ruby
You can feed data to widgets directly from a Ruby script/app. Smashing 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
Smashing 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.
Cons
Con Does not work on IE
Smashing'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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