I think the lack of a ggplot2 equivalent is one of the main things holding people back from fully converting from R to Python - I know it is for me. Once you really understand the ggplot2 syntax and style, making your graphics seems to come naturally. It's fantastic.
I see that Blaze is BSD-licensed... but Bokeh has no clear licensing information. Anyone know the intended Bokeh license?
(The Dr. Dobbs article doesn't mention licensing at all; the Continuum release implies the XDATA program has a focus on open source but doesn't specify more about Bokeh.)
Bokeh has three components. BokehJS runs in the browser, the Bokeh server and the Bokeh Python client library.
BokehJS draws plots in the browser with canvas. BokehJS maintains a data model of plot models (plots, renederers of different types, tools) with Backbone JS. It has a a connection to the Bokeh server via web sockets.
The Bokeh server keeps track of plot objects and other models with redis. It keeps these persistently in documents.
The python client connects to the server and either create new plots or updates existing plots. You can create a plot with python and get a url to embed that plot in any web page. This means that your python code can just be a script that doesn't have to worry about serving up a web page.
We intend to write client libraries in other languages like java, R, and ruby to name a few.
So... the server would maintain a set of grammar-of-graphics-like objects, which would be replicated as backbone models? In theory we could use whichever graphics libraries we want on top the backbone layer, right?
Bokeh is starting to sound like everything I've ever wanted.
http://continuum.io/blog/continuum-wins-darpa-xdata-funding
The money is going to develop Blaze and Bokeh:
http://blaze.pydata.org/
https://github.com/ContinuumIO/Bokeh