web

The Shiny framework is a web application framework for the R programming language, designed by Joe Cheng, to help R programmers turn their analysis into interactive web applications. Fortunately, it does without requiring that the R programmer know HTML, CSS or JavaScript - greatly widening the possible audience of users. At the January DataScience.LA R Meetup, we were fortunate to have Joe Cheng, Software Engineer at RStudio and original architect of Shiny present an introduction to Shiny.

At useR! 2014, one of the most anticipated presentations was Joe Cheng’s Shiny: R made interactive. It was but one of the of a fantastic series of talks by RStudio representatives; check out Winston Chang’s ggvis: Interactive graphics in R for another great talk. Shiny begins with your R code and ends with the customer’s view: an interactive, browser-accessible application. This enables you to place a great deal of power into your users’ hands to customize their view and provides a variety of new and innovative ways to interact with the data, such as by tuning parameters and focusing on sub-populations. Essentially, Shiny functions by allowing you to “wire up” up a reactive application, greatly speeding up the development of a data and analysis based web app.