whyAPIs
Taming the Shiny monolith
How do you know your Shiny app is too big?
- hard to identify where to make changes
- hard to pass off to new people or onboard new people
- accidentally break it (one parenthesis off takes hours to fix)
Progression of a Shiny application
- app.R file monolith
2a. get smarter and decouple UI from Server. Organizational benefit only.
2b. profile code (
profvisandshinyloadtest) - Shiny modules
- Tipping point -- hardened applications. Web application. Shiny becomes a lightweight front end. or it is recoded as a javascript front end. Focus is to put the brains in an API on the back end. Decouple front end from processing with microprocessing. Benefits are: a. maintainability b. reduction of technical debt c. sharability d. collaboration e. icing on the cake - side effects of focusing strictly on functionality
For each module, indentify processes and components that are important. The connections are just httr requests to the API.