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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Note: Dashing is no longer maintained, but still works fine.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.
Specs
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 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 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 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.