My first Shiny App published to Shiny.io

Today I published my first Shiny App on Shiny.io. It is a very simple app that uses the built in mtcars data set and plots two of the variables against each other. It also uses a third variable to color the points of the scatter plot. I added a plot of the linear regression fit for fun. I really enjoy creating Shiny Apps, and there has been some demand in the consulting business to do them. I sometimes find the more strict format of Shiny to be frustrating. It looks like R, but it just does not let everything through like R does. As non programmer one of the things I love about R is that it is so flexible and forgiving.

Anyway, here is a link to my Shiny App on ShinyApp.io.

Shiny is web frame work for R.  It was created by the guys at RStudio. It basically allow you to deploy interactive R code through a webpage. This output could be in the form of text or graphs. The most common use is to deploy interactive graphs that let other people control the parameters of the plot using thing s call widgets. Widgets comes in all kinds of varieties, but basically the are things like check boxes and sliders that than change the elements being plotted. There is the additional option of using javascript plotting packages within the shiny framework so that you interact direct will some of the features of the plot. A good example of this is the rCharts package. I first started using the rCharts package because it allows the user to hover directly over a plotted point and for a window to open up with information about that point. The is a very useful feature.  Although write code for shiny looks like R, I will warn you that shiny is a little picky about format than I am used to in R. That pickiness about things like commas caused me a little pain in the beginning, but once you get used to it, it is not big deal.

The Shiny website is an excellent source of information on Shiny. It provides a great tutorial to get you started. It also provides a gallery of existing shiny apps that you can view and get ideas from. The gallery is also great because one of the best ways to learn shiny is to use the existing formats in the gallery to build your own shiny app. This was very helpful to me. I just copy over a few of these examples into my RStudio session and started modify the code to change things. use a different data set, change the variables, add regression line, etc.

Here is the link to Shiny

As you can see from the link to my app. The folks at RStudio have also created something called ShinyApp.io. ShinyApp.io is a place to deploy you shiny apps to on the web so anyone can view and interact with them. It is an excellent setup and ridiculously easy to use. You simply deploy you shiny app from you Rstudio environment, and there it is up and running.