Simulations Using Shiny

Stephen Moore, DBA / Developer
March 21, 2015

3 Reasons To Build a Shiny Application

  1. Interactive Graphics
  2. R Language
  3. Rapid Development

Interactive Graphics

Web users are no longer engaged by static graphics, even those produced with current graphics packages like ggplot2.

Shiny can engage users by adding interactivity to R graphics. Shiny includes a set of widgets (sliders, combo boxes, check boxes, etc.) and a straightforward event-handling model that can be used to produce interesting interactive applications.

R Language

Shiny applications have access to the most of the capabilities of the R programming language and graphics packages like ggplot2.

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-1

Rapid Development

  1. Twitter Bootstrap framework enables a developer with little to no knowledge of CSS to produce attractive, responsive applications.
  2. Everything an R developer has learned about the R programming language transfers readily to Shiny application development.
  3. R Studio IDE has excellent development, debugging and testing capabilities.
  4. Deploying a Shiny application to the R Studio shinyapps.io site is free and simple relative to deploying a typical web application developed using tools like the LAMP stack, Ruby on Rails, et al.