What is Shiny App

Shiny is an open source R package that provides an elegant and powerful web framework for building web applications using R. Shiny helps you turn your analyses into interactive web applications without requiring HTML, CSS, or JavaScript knowledge.

Shiny is an R package that makes it easy to build interactive web apps straight from R. You can host standalone apps on a webpage or embed them in R Markdown documents or build dashboards. You can also extend your Shiny apps with CSS themes, htmlwidgets, and JavaScript actions.

install.packages("shiny")

Structure of a Shiny App

Shiny apps are contained in a single script called app.R. The script app.R lives in a directory (for example, newdir/) and the app can be run with runApp("newdir").

app.R has three components:

a user interface object

a server function

a call to the shinyApp function

The user interface (ui) object controls the layout and appearance of your app. The server function contains the instructions that your computer needs to build your app. Finally the shinyApp function creates Shiny app objects from an explicit UI/server pair.

Note: Prior to version 0.10.2, Shiny did not support single-file apps and the ui object and server function needed to be contained in separate scripts called ui.R and server.R, respectively. This functionality is still supported in Shiny, however the tutorial and much of the supporting documentation focus on single-file apps.

One nice feature about single-file apps is that you can copy and paste the entire app into the R console, which makes it easy to quickly share code for others to experiment with. For example, if you copy and paste the code above into the R command line, it will start a Shiny app.

ui

Here is the ui object for the Hello Shiny example.

References:

https://www.rstudio.com/products/shiny/#:~:text=Shiny%20is%20an%20open%20source,%2C%20CSS%2C%20or%20JavaScript%20knowledge.

https://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/