The R-Podcast Episode 15: Introduction to Shiny

Just in time for the new year is a new episode of the R-Podcast! I give a brief introduction to the Shiny package for creating web applications using R code, provide some of my tips and tricks I have learned (sometimes the hard way) when creating applications, and point to excellent resources and example apps in the community that show the immense potential at your fingertips. You will see that r-podcast.org has gotten a major overhaul, and as a consequence the RSS feeds have changed slightly. Be sure to check out the Subscribe page for the updated feeds, but all of the previous episodes have been migrated successfully. As always you can provide your feedback in multiple ways:

• New Feature: Provide a comment on this episode post directly (powered by the Disqus commenting system)
• Email the show at thercast[at]gmail.com
• Use the new Contact Form directly on the site.
• Leave a voicemail at at +1-269-849-9780

Happy New Year and I hope you enjoy the episode!

Direct Download: [mp3 format] [ogg format]

Episode 15 Show Notes

r-podcast.org gets a face lift!

• Now powered by the awesome Nikola static site generator. Able to write all content using markdown!
• Potential to use R-Markdown for future content! See Edward Borasky’s excellent tutorial: http://www.znmeb.mobi/stories/blogging-with-rstudio-and-nikola
• Shout out to Roberto and the rest of the Nikola contributors for helping me fix some key migration issues! Still a few tweaks to go, pardon the dust as I continue to make improvements.
• Now with SSL support via the lets encrypt initiative, and the certificate is absolutely free!

My shiny development tips

• Start with the excellent Shiny development portal by RStudio as well as recent webinars
• Also check Dean Attali’s great tutorial on his blog
• Shiny UI: Make sure to not have any missing commas or too many commas!
• On top of the official shiny app gallery, also check out the shiny user showcase as well as showmeshiny.com for great examples.
• Many shiny functions (such as reactive) allow you to supply R code enclosed in {} as the first parameter. Like writing a regular R function, make sure that you explicitely call the desired result object at the end or use a return call.
• Using the sidebar layout is good for apps with a few UI controls and output containers, but my complex apps benefit from the flexibility offered by the grid layout system. See the layout article for more details.

Apps that helped me learn the power of Shiny

• Radiant: Business analytics using R and Shiny by Vincent Nijs

Keeping up with the Shiny community

• shiny-discuss mailing list
• shiny-related blog posts on R-Bloggers

New features to watch

• Interactive Plots within Shiny itself. See the interactive plots, selecting rows of data, and interactive plots advanced articles.
• Plotly interaction with Shiny. See the Plotly graphs in shiny tutorial for more details.

R Community Roundup

Building Widgets blog by Kent Russell: Great showcase of converting many different javascript libraries for use in R, many of which are a great fit for Shiny.

• DiagrammeR
• visNetwork
• sweetAlertR

Package Pick

• stubthat: Provide stubs for use while unit testing in R.

News

ggplot2 version 2.0.0 released!

• “Perhaps the bigggest news in this release is that ggplot2 now has an official extension mechanism. This means that others can now easily create their on stats, geoms and positions, and provide them in other packages. This should allow the ggplot2 community to flourish, even as less development work happens in ggplot2 itself. See vignette(“extending-ggplot2”) for details.
• Additional details can be seen in the release notes

Feedback

• Leave a comment on this episode’s post
• Email the show: thercast[at]gmail.com
• Use the R-Podcast contact page
• Leave a voicemail at +1-269-849-9780

Music Credits

• Opening and closing themes: Training Montage by WillRock from the Return All Robots Remix Album at ocremix.org