ENH: KafkaProgressBar

[cjtitus]

Enhancement Idea

Especially when using QueueServer, it would be useful to have a way to send progress information across a network, so that, e.g., motor moves, can be monitored remotely by arbitrary (and yet-to-be-written) programs or widgets.

The built-in Bluesky TerminalProgressBar only outputs to stdout, which may not always be desirable or sufficient, especially if a QueueServer is running on a VM, and the clients that would like to display progress are Qt Apps, Web apps, etc.

A KafkaProgressBar would be a bluesky ProgressBarBase subclass that sends progress info over the network, separate from other data streams like console output or documents. This could still leverage a library such as tqdm, but it may be more prudent to send the progress info (values, timestamps, labels) as a dictionary (which may naturally be passed into tqdm.format_meter), so that the raw values could also be shoved into any other progress bar in any target language/framework, rather than just passing tqdm formatted strings.

A corresponding KafkaProgressBarDispatcher could be implemented to subscribe to the stream, and dispatch progress messages to a desired output library (like tqdm, QProgressBar, etc). This could be implemented as an example in Qt and non-Qt versions, but could also be left for users to implement in their own programs (i.e, web-based GUIs)

To be determined

• format of progress info
• default stream name
• if a KafkaProgressBarDispatcher should be implemented

Comments/Suggestions welcome