By Built with Anvil: a Community Showcase
We keep seeing people use Anvil for amazing things! As the Anvil community grows, we’ll take a look at some of the things – from internal applications to whole businesses – being built on Anvil.
In this edition:
- Product Catalogues for In-Store iPads
- Data Exploration Tools for Schools
- Real-Time Snowmobile Race Tracking
- A Platform for Hosting and Scoring Machine Learning Competitions
Product Catalogues for In-Store iPads
Creating a digital product catalogue sounds like a reasonably straightforward task - get product information from your suppliers, store it in a database, and create a simple web application to browse the catalogue. Unfortunately, this is far from the reality. Kevin Dalias has spent years working to improve a system that’s fundamentally broken. He’s using Anvil to build Ruchomi, an app designed simplify the complex process of working with retail product data, making product catalogues as simple as they should be, and accessible to sales staff on the shop floor.
Ruchomi receives catalogue data in all sorts of formats (PDF, malformatted CSV…) from a number of manufacturers. With a little help from Python and machine learning, they wrangle the data into a sensible format, label and categories each product, and then aggregate the data into a digital product catalogue that sales staff can access right on the shop floor.
Ruchomi Product Catalogue
With Anvil, I can actually write the code myself and write the interactions myself. It lets me put industrial expertise into the product itself rather than [paying to develop] some third party product that I have no control over.
I built the MVP app in about two weeks. It would have taken 6 months in any other format.
Kevin Dalias
Founder & CEO, Ruchomi
Data Exploration Tools for Schools
Why does a school board need a data scientist? Allan Campopiano is a Research Analyst at Halton Catholic District School Board and, with the help of Anvil, has changed the way his school board uses data after showing the senior leadership what was possible. Allan’s research department covers 52 schools and over 30,000 students and analyses a staggering amount of data across a range of datasets. They provide reports so that superintendents and senior administrators can make can make evidence-based decisions, track metrics of student success and identify areas for improvement.
Al has built an impressive number of applications with Anvil. Among these are:
- School Board Research Portal - a central hub used by the board to connect staff to resources offered by the research department.
- Workflow Management for Mental Health Referrals - an application that creates, manages and visualises mental health referral applications.
- Graphical Querying Tool for Exploring Student Data - a graphical query builder allowing staff to select student records that satisfy a particular pattern or criteria
- School Visit Tracker - an app for tracking school visits. Uses role-based user authentication to display different information depending on which member of staff is logged in.
- Interactive Student Attendance Viewer - a live and interactive view of consecutive and habitual absences for any school for which the user is granted access.
HCDSB Research Portal
Allan Campopiano
Research Analyst, HCDSB
Real-Time Snowmobile Race Tracking
Every February, a few dozen hardy folks mount their snowmobiles and set off into the wilderness of Alaska, covering over two thousand miles of rugged terrain in 35 hours of racing. They are followed on this journey by thousands of spectators from all over the world.
The Iron Dog team built their Live Race tracker with Anvil. With the race tracker, users can:
- view racers’ progress by viewing them on a GPS map
- view the current leaderboard
- view team information
- view team progress at each checkpoint
The Epic Iron Dog Race
Brice Wilbanks
Tech Lead, Iron Dog
A Platform for Hosting and Scoring Machine Learning Competitions
What can data science do for Mongolia? Robert Ritz moved from Texas to Ulaanbaatar and founded LETU Mongolia, where he now teaches business and data science. Robert’s building some impressive applications with Anvil, from a Mongolian speech recognition app to an app for hosting machine learning competitions at LETU. He’s even using Anvil to monitor Mongolian air quality and perform stock exchange analysis.
Robert was teaching his Machine Learning course at LETU and realised there wasn’t an existing platform that quite met his needs for hosting and scoring ML competitions. So he built one with Anvil, and had the basic functionality up and running in just 10 hours!
Students using the platform can:
- Sign in with their G suite account (restricted to students on Robert’s course)
- View problem sets
- Download training data
- Submit predictions
- View a live, dynamic leaderboard that updates when new scores are calculated
LETU Machine Learning Competition
Robert Ritz
Founder, LETU Mongolia
Join the Anvil Community
We have a very active community Forum – it’s a great place to get help, ask questions and see what other people are building. Come and join us!
If you’re new here, welcome! Anvil is a platform for building full-stack web apps with nothing but Python. No need to wrestle with JS, HTML, CSS, Python, SQL and all their frameworks – just build it all in Python.
Want to build an app of your own? Get started with one of our tutorials:
Data Dashboard
Build Database-Backed Apps
Build a Simple Feedback Form
Build a data-entry app, and learn the techniques fundamental to building any Anvil app. In this tutorial, you will:
- Write server-side Python
- Build your User Interface
- Write client-side Python
- Store data in a database
- Deploy your app