Interactive Playground for Mesa & Mesa Frames

[reyan-singh]

@EwoutH @tpike3 @adamamer20 I was thinking of solutions/ideas to expand Mesa and Mesa Frames usability to an even larger audience specially focused on beginners , who are new to ABM. This can provide its reachability to various industries where it could be very beneficial. After researching Pycafe visualizations of Mesa Solara, I explored different examples and their visual representations. This led me to an idea—what if we could publish a browser-based HTML file containing Python scripts to extend the documentation feature. This interactive environment would allow users to tweak with various existing and future examples effortlessly.

I started by creating an interactive playground for the Prisoner's Dilemma example and published it on GitHub Pages, eliminating any server hosting costs. This setup replicates Pycafe’s demonstration capabilities while making Mesa more accessible to a wider audience. The goal is to make Mesa more intuitive, lower the entry barrier for new users, and expand its adoption beyond just programmers.

By enabling users to visualize examples with a single click from any device even on a handheld device.

You can view the initial implementation here:
🔗 https://reyan-singh.github.io/Test_Interactive_Mesa_Playground/

Whats Next?
I am trying to explore more broader idea for this POC which would be to introduce inline custom code execution to let user test their creative model ideas in real time. This give users chance and helping them to understand and grasp the evolution of agent behaviors to further extending existing/new models. This approach would make Mesa more beginner-friendly and encourage greater contributions to the mesa/mesa-frames project.

[reyan-singh]

@EwoutH @tpike3 @adamamer20 Added one more working demo based on Mesa existing example "The Boltzmann Wealth Model"

https://reyan-singh.github.io/Test_Interactive_Mesa_Playground/BoltzMann_index.html

[Sahil-Chhoker]

Hello @reyan-singh,

Really great initiative—building Mesa’s own web app with all the examples hosted there! I love the idea but also see its limitations. Creating a web app from scratch to match Mesa’s visualization capabilities is a massive effort, which is why #2727 was opened.

The goal of #2727 is to make models more accessible by hosting them on PyCafe, a well-known platform for creating and hosting Python apps online. Trying to replicate PyCafe’s level of detail from scratch would be too much work and redundant since such a platform already exists.

That said, as a web developer, I’m really curious about how you're handling the backend for this. Would love to know more!