9 Where Next?

The wide world of shiny is now yours for the taking. I’m compiling a list of resources that I found really useful below.

9.1 Programming Resources

  • The Shiny Gallery - Tons of examples about how to implement things in Shiny. Please note that the examples can be a little too terse.
  • Dean Attali’s Site - his “Advanced Shiny Tips” page has a really useful FAQ. This is usually where I start when I have a question.
  • Advanced Shiny (Dean Attali) - This is the repo for all of Dean’s shiny tips.
  • Plotly - with the plotly package, you can translate ggplots into client-side d3.js plots, which can be customized with a lot more interactivity, and it runs on top of shiny. I’m still learning how to use it, but you can make your interactive graphics very slick with it.

9.2 Cool Shiny Enhancements

  • flexDashboard - Mix Rmarkdown and shiny! Make interactive documents!
  • shinyDashboard - Make a more professional dashboard for your integrated shiny app. Includes alerts, menus, and status updates.
  • shinyLP - Make a landing page for your shiny app. By Jasmine Dumas.
  • shinyjs - Add more JavaScript components to your shiny app.

9.3 Deploying your app

You may notice that we’ve run everything on our own machines. What if we want to share our apps? We’ll need to deploy them to a web accessible server. There are two main places you can deploy your Shiny apps.

https://shinyapps.io is a more streamlined service, and it lets you push apps to it using the rsconnect package. For more info, go here: http://docs.rstudio.com/shinyapps.io/. The free account gives you 5 free apps and something like 25 hours of access time for free.

if you need more service, Rstudio’s new RStudio Connect service: https://www.rstudio.com/products/connect/. Rstudio Connect is more of a complete solution, giving you a web-accessible Rstudio server instance along with a shiny server instance. It costs money.

You can also install Shiny Server on something like a DigitalOcean Droplet, or a web-accessible server. Note that if you are non-academic, or need things like user authentication, you’ll need to pay for a license.

9.4 I want more!

Look into the world of htmlwidgets: http://www.htmlwidgets.org. Basically, people are trying to bring more visualization frameworks (such as d3.js) to R. Someone may have a htmlwidget that could work for you.