Shiny Apps allows developers and researchers to easily build interactive web applications only using the statistical software R. These apps allow R developers to interactively communicate their work to a broader audience in order to facilitate outreach. Since Shiny Apps comes with an extensive backend setup, users do not need extensive web development skills to build and host standalone apps on a homepage. However, for those keen in building beautiful apps, Shiny Apps allows for CSS, html and JavaScript extensions. In this workshop, I introduce the Shiny environment and show important features to develop Shiny apps, which can be used either for data presentation, as a communication tool for results or even as interactive analytical tool. Using the example data sets by R, I introduce the distinction between front-end ui.R and back-end server.R required to build Shiny apps. Based upon this, I will introduce important concepts and features to build an interactive app, including control widgets, reactivity and rendering. The participants will be able to build their own Shiny App after this workshop. In the last part of the workshop, I am going to show two ways of deploying Shiny Apps (letting them run in the world wide web), https://www.shinyapps.io and Shiny Server.
Social Science Data Lab, MZES, University of Mannheim
Tuesday, October 15, 2019, MZES A Building, Room A-231
Konstantin Gavras (homepage, twitter, GitHub)
Working knowledge of R is a necessary prerequisite. You're assumed to be familiar with base R as well as the tidyverse. You are not expected to have substantial web development skills.
Please make sure that the current version of R is installed. If not, update from here: https://cran.r-project.org/.