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)

HTML templates

The developers of Shiny themselves noted that although it has always been possible to produce entire Shiny applications in HTML, it is very rare to find any examples where somebody has done so. This is probably because of Shiny's ability to produce attractive applications using pure R code (and its ability to incorporate snippets of HTML), as well as the relative complexity of writing the whole interface yourself. To make things simpler, Shiny 0.13 added the ability to use HTML templates. Using an HTML template, you can very easily mix together HTML and Shiny code. There are two main ways of doing this: firstly by defining the code inline within the HTML, and secondly by defining it with the ui.R file. In both cases, you will need three files—a server.R file, a ui.R file, and another file, at the same directory level (not in a www/ folder), which will...