Introduction to Shiny: A Simple Way to Create Web Apps with R and Python

Content

Browser-based applications are an ideal medium to showcase interactive research results, distribute simple tools, and provide adaptable visualizations for datasets. But using traditional web development frameworks can be complicated, particularly for researchers accustomed to more traditional programming languages such as R and Python. Shiny is a framework for R, and more recently also Python, that allows for building web applets in a reactive programming paradigm that can be as simple as stacking “building blocks” of interactive and display elements. In this course, we will study the basics of Shiny and its reactive programming paradigm, look at building some simple apps to showcase Shiny features (and potential pitfalls), and conclude by building a new app from scratch.

Requirements

• Academic Cloud account (already fulfilled at sign up)
• Basic R programming knowledge, and potentially Python
• Exercise will be run on one of the GWDG compute clusters through the Jupyter-HPC service

Learning goal

• Learn about reactive programming and what makes it different from other programming paradigms
• Learn the basic building blocks of a Shiny application
• Design a basic Shiny application

Skills

Trainer

• Dr. Martin Leandro Paleico

Next appointment