Shiny is a framework work for creating web applications with R. Joe Cheng of RStudio, Inc. presented on Shiny last evening in Zillow’s offices 30 stories up in the former WaMu Center. Luckily, the talk was interesting enough to compete with the view of Elliot bay aglow with late evening sunlight streaming through breaks in the clouds over the Olympics.

Shiny is very slick, achieving interactive and pleasant looking web UIs with node.js, websockets and bootstrap under the hood. It’s designed on a reactive programming model (like bacon and ember) that eliminates a lot of the boiler-plate code associated with listeners or observers in UI coding.

Shiny comes in two parts, the shiny R package for developing Shiny apps and Shiny server for deploying them. The RStudio company intends to create a paid tier consisting of an enterprise server and a paid hosting service, Glimmer, which is free for now.

Among several demos were a plot of TV Show Rankings over time and a neat integration with Google’s Geochart library to map World Bank health nutrition and population statistics. There are also some examples of combining D3 with Shiny (G3Plot).

Possibly, the coolest demo was a tutorial on reactive programming in the form of an R console in a browser. Chunks of code could drag-and-drop around as in “live document” systems like IPython notebooks or Chris Granger’s Clojure IDE Light Table.

Links

• Slides and source code are on github in Joe’s seattle-meetup repo.
• To learn more, check out the Shiny Tutorial