Creating scatter plots with Bokeh-Scala

While Zeppelin is powerful enough to quickly execute our Spark SQLs and visualize data, it is still an evolving platform. In this section, we'll take a brief look at the most popular visualizing framework in Python, called Bokeh, and use its (also fast evolving) Scala bindings to the framework. Breeze also has a visualization API called breeze-viz, which is built on JFreeChart. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this book, the API is not actively maintained, and therefore we won't be discussing it here.

The power of Zeppelin lies in the ability to share and view graphics on the browser. This is brought forth by the backing of the D3.js JavaScript visualization library. Bokeh is also backed by another JavaScript visualization library, called BokehJS. The Scala bindings library (bokeh-scala) not only gives an easier way to construct glyphs (lines, circles, and so on) out of Scala objects, but also translates glyphs into a format that is...