Shiny is a new package from RStudio that makes it incredibly easy to build interactive web applications with R.
For an introduction or to see some live examples, visit the Shiny homepage.
- No JavaScript required. Shiny handles all that stuff. It may be the fastest way to build a useful web application to share data analysis in R.
- It's live. Outputs change instantly as users modify inputs, without requiring a reload of the browser.
- Different users can see different segments of the data, or time ranges, or whatever they want. There's no need to make 20 charts if you have 20 segments.
- You can easily add in interactive charts like rCharts, GoogleVis or D3. You can also customize the look and feel of the page because it is, after all, a web page. We won't be doing that here, but the ability to customize the look and feel of the page is endless.
- We will build 2 shiny apps.
- The first app is a basic app to show how it works.
- The second uses data from the Github timeline on Google BigQuery. We will rank the most popular languages this year on GitHub.
- There is a master branch which you should work from. All the instructions are in the readme for each app directory.
- If you get stuck take a look in the answers branch for help
- If you finish quickly, checkout the advanced branch to add a few more cool features to your apps.
- Don't copy and paste my code. Type all the code yourself and you will get a sense for what you are coding.
Click on the app_getting_started directory and follow the instructions in the README to get started.
For more details on how this all works you can check out these 10 Shiny lessons from RStudio.