Shiny: A web application framework for R

While browsing the web in search of supporting material for the “Statistical Inference” course on Coursera, I ended up on this link, which proposed an interactive simulation of the Central Limit Theorem for Means.  It works well, it is a nice piece of work.

I decided to have a look at the code, since in the bottom of the page there is a link to it. And there I was surprised for the first time! It is R code! It consists of a server.R  and ui.R parts, and both start with:

library(shiny)

So, I do not know yet a lot about this, but these are the main points:

  • Shiny is produced by the guys at RStudio
  • They have provided a gallery of apps with source code
  • They have provided almost 2.5 hours of tutorials to learn how to code shiny applications

Some of the application in the gallery look gorgeous. I do not have time now to go through the tutorials, but I will most certainly do at a later point.