Shiny is a
free and open source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
R package for developing
web application
A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection.
History
In earlier computing models like client-serve ...
s (apps). It was announced by Joe Cheng,
CTO of
RStudio, in 2012.
One of the uses of Shiny has been in fast
prototyping
A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design
A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object o ...
.
A separate implementation Shiny for Python, is already available as alpha software, and while the goal is the same, it uses Python syntax (and semantics) so it's not fully compatible. It's not meant to be a replacement, i.e. both will be developed concurrently and may never have all the features of each other. There is also Shinylive, for the Python version (only, at least for now), that allows running Shiny on the client (i.e. program code does not run on the server, reducing server load to just serving the code itself).
Features
Shiny creates a
reactive context wherein the user specifies, through input variables, the circumstances under which computations are re-executed, or graphs (often visualizations) re-rendered; this occurs almost instantaneously. The input variables are evaluated via a
user interface
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...
which allows the simple creation of
widgets such as
text box
type=search
placeholder=An example text box, which can be used to search the English Wikipedia.
A text box (input box), text field or text entry box is a control element of a graphical user interface, that should enable the user to input ...
es,
radio buttons, and
drop-down list
A drop-down list (abbreviated drop-down, or DDL; also known as a drop-down menu, drop menu, pull-down list, picklist) is a graphical control element
A graphical widget (also graphical control element or control) in a graphical user inte ...
s.
There are two main parts to a Shiny file, which may alternatively be stored in two separate files. One is designed to accommodate the user interface, the appearance of which is restricted by the default choices, though can be extended through various other R packages. The other is designed to accommodate the server computations and plot generating code, for which all the built-in facilities of R are available.
a Shiny app on an RStudio server is free up to certain limits but paid tiers are relatively expensive compared to hosting on other cloud computing platforms.
References
External links
*
Business software
Free web development software
Free R (programming language) software
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