Introducing Jaal — Interacting with Network Made Easy

Your interactive network visualizing dashboard in Python

Photo by Ella Baxter on Unsplash

Visit the package’s github page for code and detailed readme. Also, if you like it, please don’t shy from clicking on the star 😏

👉 Preface

Not long ago I posted an article introducing several network visualizing tools in Python. The response was phenomenal. The best part was the messages where people shared their experiences, preferences and problems. One interesting point was how many were excited about one of the options, but it required a lot of boilerplate code to get started. This problem was the catalyst for Jaal, where I have tried to remove all of the frills required to plot a network in Python using Dash and visdcc. Apart from that, I have also tried to add some of the most common interactions I personally feel a network visualization tool should have. So without further ado, let’s dive into the Jaal 😄

👉What is Jaal

Jaal is a python based interactive network visualizing tool built using Dash and Visdcc. As it’s built using Dash, we can consider it as more of a dashboard rather than a network plot. Because of this, along with the basic features, Jaal also provides multiple options to play with the network data such as searching, filtering and even colouring nodes and edges in the graph. And all of this within 2 lines of codes :)

👉Install

Installing Jaal is super easy, just run the following,

pip install jaal

And you are done 😆

Note, it’s recommended to create a virtual environment before installing. This can be easily done using python -m venv myenv and then to activate the environment we run,

1. (Windows) .\\myvenv\\Scripts\\activate.bat
2. (Linux) source myvenv/bin/activate

👉Getting started

After installing Jaal, we need to fetch the data and call plot function in Jaal. Let’s do this by playing with Game of Thrones dataset which is included in the package. The complete code to fetch the data and plot is as follows,