Creating plots with the lightning visualization server

Lightning is a framework for interactive data visualization, including a server, visualizations, and client libraries. The lightning server provides API-based access to reproducible, web-based visualizations. It includes a core set of visualization types, but is built for extendibility and customization. It can be deployed in many ways, including Heroku, Docker, a public server, a local app for OS X and even a serverless version well suited to notebooks such as Jupyter.

Lightning can expose a single visualization to all the languages of data science. Client libraries are available in multiple languages, including Python, Scala, JavaScript, and rstats, with many more in future.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you will need a running Spark Cluster in any one of the modes, that is, local, standalone, YARN, or Mesos. Install Hadoop (optionally), Scala, and Java. Lightning is designed to support a variety of use cases. The first option...