Shiny is a user contributed package for R that allows interactive web
interfaces to easily be delivered through a web browser using only R
code. No JavaScript is required. It’s simple to use R code to build user
interfaces. There is also a lot of power and flexibility within the
Shiny package, and its functionality can be expanded using
user-contributed packages, as well as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
In this video course, you’ll start off by installing R, R Studio, and
Shiny. Moving on, you’ll learn about Code files and how to build a
simple application in Shiny. You’ll explore an RMarkdown document to
understand how Shiny can be embedded straight into a document.
Moving on, you’ll learn about the Shiny input and output widgets and
how to put them together into a larger application. Further we’ll
present several features of Shiny, such as animation, data tables,
downloading and uploading data, and how to produce attractive and
interactive data tables. We’ll also include a toy example.
Finally, you will learn about reactive programming in Shiny and how
to control reactivity in your programs. We’ll use a full-featured
application to explore the ggplot2movies dataset. Moving on we’ll show
you in detail how reactivity works, how it can be controlled. We’ll
conclude the course by learning how to handle errors, debugging, and
rate control in Shiny applications.
About the Author
Chris Beeley works for Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust as
the lead analyst and programmer for staff and patient experience. He
uses a variety of open source tools (PHP/MySQL, Apache, R, Shiny, and
Ubuntu) to collect, collate, analyze, and report on patient and staff
experience throughout the organization. He was the author of the
previous edition of this book.
He has been a keen user of R and a passionate advocate of open source
tools in research and healthcare settings, having completed his PhD. He
has made extensive use of R (and Shiny) to automate analysis and report
on a new patient feedback website. This was funded by a grant from the
NHS Institute for Innovation and made in collaboration with staff,
service users, and carers within the Trust, particularly individuals
from the Involvement Centre.
