You have some very good insight into this, and enterprise data workflows more generally. I think the major downside of IPyWidgets is that it conflates many different concerns:
- Layout
- Data binding
- Code evaluation
- View
All these are handled by widgets, and each widget is linked up in an ad-hoc fashion (whether via callbacks, link, or interactive). This means that the technical complexity of a dashboard can scale exponentially with the number of widgets! Each additional widget is a change that is harder to pull back from, and at some point it becomes hard even to add an additional slider.
One solution that works right now for Pythonistas is PyViz; PyViz (and it’s constituent components Panel, Parameters, etc) separate out these concerns nicely and let you disentangle application logic from view.
My company, Mavenomics, is working on something called MavenWorks that goes further. We’re in early alpha but our goal is to offer iterative, UI-oriented dashboarding so that all levels of users (including your non-technical, programming-averse users!) can iterate on dashboards quickly.
You can take a look here on GitHub (Mavenomics/MavenWorks), or jump right in with our demos on Binder.
This is still very alpha, but if it interests you we’d love to have you try it out and give us your thoughts!