Book Image

Web Application Development with R Using Shiny - Third Edition

By : Chris Beeley, Shitalkumar R. Sukhdeve
Book Image

Web Application Development with R Using Shiny - Third Edition

By: Chris Beeley, Shitalkumar R. Sukhdeve

Overview of this book

Web Application Development with R Using Shiny helps you become familiar with the complete R Shiny package. The book starts with a quick overview of R and its fundamentals, followed by an exploration of the fundamentals of Shiny and some of the things that it can help you do. You’ll learn about the wide range of widgets and functions within Shiny and how they fit together to make an attractive and easy to use application. Once you have understood the basics, you'll move on to studying more advanced UI features, including how to style apps in detail using the Bootstrap framework or and Shiny's inbuilt layout functions. You'll learn about enhancing Shiny with JavaScript, ranging from adding simple interactivity with JavaScript right through to using JavaScript to enhance the reactivity between your app and the UI. You'll learn more advanced Shiny features of Shiny, such as uploading and downloading data and reports, as well as how to interact with tables and link reactive outputs. Lastly, you'll learn how to deploy Shiny applications over the internet, as well as and how to handle storage and data persistence within Shiny applications, including the use of relational databases. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to create responsive, interactive web applications using the complete R (v 3.4) Shiny (1.1.0) suite.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Shiny First Steps

In the previous chapter, we looked at R, learned some of its basic syntax, and saw some examples of the power and flexibility that R and Shiny offer. This chapter introduces the basics of Shiny. In this chapter, we're going to build our own application to interactively explore the Gapminder data described in the previous chapter. We will cover the following topics:

  • The types of Shiny application—R Markdown, single-file, two-file, Shiny gadgets
  • Interactive Shiny documents in R Markdown
  • Single-file Shiny applications
  • Two-file Shiny applications
  • A minimal example of a full Shiny application
  • Widget types
  • The basic structure of a Shiny program
  • The selection of simple input widgets (checkboxes and combo buttons)
  • The selection of simple output types (rendering plots and maps, and returning text)
  • The selection of simple layout types (page with sidebar and...