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)

Widget types

Before we move on to a more advanced application, let's have a look at the main widgets that you will make use of within Shiny. I've built a Shiny application that will show you what they all look like, as well as their outputs and the type of data they return. To run it, just enter the following command:

> library(shiny)
runGist(6571951)

This is one of the several built-in functions of Shiny that allow you to run code hosted on the internet. Details about sharing your own creations in other ways are discussed in Chapter 9, Persistence, Storage, and Sharing. The finished application looks like the following screenshot:

You can see the function names (checkboxGroupInput and checkboxInput) as numbered entries on the left-hand side of the panel; for more details, just type ?checkboxGroupInput into the console.

If you're curious about the code, it...