Blike

Blike is a modular software framework designed for web-based data visualization and collaborative analytics. It provides a suite of reusable components for building dashboards, charts, and interactive widgets, as well as a runtime that supports real-time collaboration among multiple users.

Blike originated as an open-source project developed by an international community focused on data-driven collaboration. The first public release appeared in 2016, with major revisions in 2018 (Blike 2), 2020 (Blike 3), and 2022–23 (Blike 4). The project is hosted on multiple code repositories and maintains documentation, example projects, and a plugin marketplace.

Architecture and design: Blike employs a client-server model with a core library and a plugin system. The client uses WebSocket and HTTP(S) for data transfer and supports responsive rendering for modern browsers. Data sources include SQL databases, REST/GraphQL APIs, and flat files such as CSV or Parquet. The visualization layer is declarative, with a set of composable widgets and a scene graph. Collaboration is enabled through shared dashboards, versioning, and per-user access controls.

Key features: Real-time co-editing, permissions management, offline-capable caching, theming and extensibility, and a library of visualization widgets and data connectors. It emphasizes interoperability with existing data stacks and embeddability into other web applications.

Applications and reception: Blike is used in business intelligence, research, and education settings to build exploratory dashboards and collaborative notebooks. Reviewers note its strong plugin ecosystem and collaborative features, while noting that performance can vary with very large datasets and complex dashboards.

See also: data visualization frameworks, collaborative software, open-source BI tools.