R Shiny

Statistics through the internet

February 11, 2020 — February 11, 2020

computers are awful
how do science
number crunching
statistics
UI

An interactive data analysis webapp generator for R. shiny provides a browser frontend to R backends.

1 Shiny basics

The RStudio tutorials are well done and include video-flavoured and text-flavoured presentations.

You can deploy public apps to the cloud via the integrated service shinyapps.io.

2 Containerized webapps

Containerized apps are a convenient way to deploy code in general and to package up interactive data analysis in particular. The dominant toolchain for this purpose seems to be Docker. R goes well in Docker. Ergo, deploying R apps to Docker seems a low-lift way of doing it. Juan Camilo Orduz teaches us how to Dockerize a Shiny App, as does Paul Stevenson, and there are shiny server dockerfiles. The sevenbridges dockerfiles demonstrate some sophisticated configuration.

3 Helpers

DT

The R package DT provides an R interface to the JavaScript library DataTables. R data objects (matrices or data frames) can be displayed as tables on HTML pages, and DataTables provides filtering, pagination, sorting, and many other features in the tables.