The Shiny framework, by RStudio, is growing in popularity as a tool that makes it easy for R developers to leverage the web as a deployment platform for sharing their analysis. However, since the very earliest release of Shiny, the development group has been bombarded with the same series questions over and over again, questions like “Does it work with d3.js?” and “Can I use JavaScript in Shiny?”

Shiny has never stopped you from doing either of these two things. On the other hand, it hasn’t made it particularly easy either. With this in mind, Yihui Xie (of knitR fame) and the RStudio team present the HTMLWidgets framework! HTMLWidgets brings the best of JavaScript visualization to R. You can, using modern RStudio builds, use HTMLWidgets right in the RStudio environment and interact with the plotting pane as if it was a modern browser. You can embed HTML Widgets in Shiny applications and RMarkdown documents. If you are an R developer with some JavaScript experience, you can even develop new widgets using the seamless R/JavaScript bridge provided by the HTMLWidgets package!

From geospatial mapping to time series visualization, from d3.js interactivity to beautiful interactive tabular display of data, the HTMLWidgets framework provides a foundation for that next level of interactivity and fluency in your interfaces. In this video, Yihui covers a foundation and a rationale for the HTMLWidgets system, and gets you well on your way to contributing to this exciting new ecosystem. You can also find his slides here. Enjoy!