useR

Tutorial: Developing web applications with R and shiny


Josh Paulson and Joe Cheng, RStudio

Overview

Shiny makes it super simple for R users to turn their analyses into interactive web applications. Within minutes, you can create a web app to share analysis results, plots, and tables directly through the web. To the user, it is simply an interactive webpage and they don’t even need to know R. They choose input parameters from friendly controls like sliders, drop-downs, and text fields. The output is dynamically displayed next to the selected inputs. Shiny provides a unique experience to combine the statistical power of R with the simplicity of a web page. No HTML or JavaScript knowledge is necessary. However, if desired, shiny can be integrated with JavaScript including the D3 library for visualization.

Goals

We will provide a full overview of shiny and together build a working web application. We’ll also cover more advanced features of shiny and show how to deploy your applications to the web.

Outline

Prerequisites

Attendees must have a basic working knowledge of R. Bring a laptop with R (>= 2.14.1), the shiny package installed from CRAN, and the latest version of RStudio installed. RStudio binaries are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux on the RStudio website.

Intended Audience

Anyone who wants to bring R's capabilities for data analysis and visualization to a wider non-technical audience. The focus of this tutorial will be how to get started with shiny and create web applications from your R code.

References

  1. RStudio, Inc. (2013). RStudio home page, http://www.rstudio.com.
  2. RStudio, Inc. (2013). Shiny home page, http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/.