Say hello to Shiny, a new R package that we’re releasing for public beta testing today.
Shiny makes it super simple for R users to turn analyses into interactive web applications that anyone can use. These applications let you specify input parameters using friendly controls like sliders, drop-downs, and text fields; and they can easily incorporate any number of outputs like plots, tables, and summaries.
No HTML or JavaScript knowledge is necessary. If you have some experience with R, you’re just minutes away from combining the statistical power of R with the simplicity of a web page:
More details, including live examples and a link to an extensive tutorial, can be found on the Shiny homepage.
The Shiny package is free and open source, and is designed primarily to run Shiny applications locally. To share Shiny applications with others, you can send them your application source as a GitHub gist, R package, or zip file (see details). We’re also working on a Shiny server that is designed to provide enterprise-grade application hosting, which we’ll offer as a subscription-based hosting service and/or commercial software package.
We’re really excited about Shiny, and look forward to seeing what kind of applications you come up with!
(Special thanks to Bryan Lewis for authoring the websockets package, which is used heavily by Shiny.)
15 comments
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November 8, 2012 at 10:18 am
Robert Muenchen (@BobMuenchen)
Very interesting! Are you guys working on full-blown GUI for R using Shiny?
November 8, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Yihui
I think it is targeted at ease-of-use, so probably far away from full-blown R GUI. Think of a simplified version of gWidgetsWWW(2) if you are familiar with gWidgets. It boosted my productivity by at least 500% this semester for my RA job, and before that I was using D3 which was simply hell for a spoiled R user…
November 8, 2012 at 10:03 pm
j verzani
Here is a small comparison between the two — shiny wins for this task. https://gist.github.com/4009017
November 8, 2012 at 1:54 pm
Tal Galili
Fantastic work guys!
Thank you for creating this cool package, I can’t wait to see what people will do with this!
November 8, 2012 at 2:42 pm
Mister R User
Oh man, if this is half as good as it looks I am going owe SOMEONE a drink or two
November 8, 2012 at 3:28 pm
Victor Moreno
I see great opportunities to build applets for teaching statistics. I am using java applets now, but in R everything is much easier and faster.
Congratulations for sharing this!!
Victor
November 9, 2012 at 3:47 am
Owe Jessen
Great, I really like what you are doing in making R acceptable for business environments.
November 9, 2012 at 11:38 am
Andrew
Shame about only having subscription or commercial licensed server component. It would be great if you offered a “small capacity” component for use with we servers such as apache, iis etc. (Enough to allow for solid POC in prod environments, getting people hooked and the offering them an upgrade path to the full commercial version)
November 12, 2012 at 10:02 am
dennislwm
I have been searching for a web GUI interface package for R, and this product came along.
I am running R-studio server on a virtualized Ubuntu, on a Windows machine. Using port forwarding on a NAT connection, I executed a shiny app as a background process, that can be browsed from any WWW.
My question is can I specify what URL and port to use, when launching the runApp() function?
I hope to see more great features added to this product in the future. Thanks for a good product.
November 12, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Joe Cheng [RStudio]
Hi Dennis, runApp takes a port argument. You can’t customize the URL though.
November 21, 2012 at 4:36 am
Interactive Visualizations with Shiny | Arne Hendrik Schulz
[...] week, the guys from RStudio released Shiny, a neat new tool to create “interactive web applications”. It seems to focus on R users [...]
November 28, 2012 at 1:36 pm
Glen
Is it possible to load the data from within Shiny (such as a csv file) or does all relevant data need to be in the source code?
I am interested in developing a Shiny App and distributing it, but the data will come from user’s machines, which I would like to load from within Shiny.
Thanks.
November 28, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Glen
Note: I posted this question stack overflow.
December 2, 2012 at 11:24 am
Mado
Shiny is great. I managed to produce not trivial application in few hours knowing nothing about shiny!
Also shiny payed web service would discourage a lot of people learning and using shiny.
R programmers are very open and I beliave lots of great apps would be produced for public use or teaching purposes, which would attract commercial users.
Would You consider other options like free limited capacity accounts or something like that instead of totally paid services.
Regards and good job, keep going!
December 18, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Merescut descans i més coses « RUG Barcelona
[...] Apareix de mans dels desenvolupadors de l’RStudio un nou package anomenat Shiny. Aquesta llibreria permet crear de forma fàcil, aplicacions web per scripts d’R (amb un navegador local). Tot i que inicialment no ho tenien clar, s‘han compromès a que la versió per servidors també serà open source. Mireu algun exemple, aquí o aquí. [...]