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)

Alternative Shiny designs

At the time of writing, there is quite an exciting new development in the world of Shiny UI, which is that developers are starting to provide Shiny interfaces to UI frameworks other than Bootstrap. The first example of this, which will hopefully lead to many more, is an implementation of the Material design framework for Shiny. Material design is the very flat design created by Google in 2014 and familiar to any user of the Android operating system. Here is an example:

The Shiny package itself is based on the open source implementation of Material design, Materialize CSS (materializecss.com/), and is called shinymaterial. It is available on CRAN (cran.r-project.org/web/packages/shinymaterial/index.html). The package itself features different functions from vanilla Shiny, material_radio_button() and material_modal(), for example, but the principles are...