Interactive web applications
with Shiny for R

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Course Overview

This three hour workshop provides the basics of creating interactive web applications in R using Shiny. It consists of three sessions that cover the basics of creating a UI, writing server code with reactive programming and publishing your application.

This workshop is part of the WOMBAT 2022 event, and will run online on Tuesday 6th December 2022 from 1PM - 4PM AEDT.

Learning objectives

  • Learn the basics of Shiny applications
  • Create a simple user interface including dashboards
  • Understand reactive programming for Shiny server code
  • Publish applications online with docker and/or shinyapps.io

Educators

Instructor

Headshot of Mitchell O'Hara-Wild Mitchell O’Hara-Wild (he/him) is an award-winning teaching associate and research assistant at Monash University with particular expertise in R package development, data analysis and statistical computing. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) with a major in econometrics, and a Bachelor of Science majoring in computational science and mathematical statistics. Mitchell is the developer of several widely used R packages and operates a data consultancy which runs workshops and provides data analysis and tools.

Blog  Github  Twitter  LinkedIn  

Helper

Headshot of Mitchell O'Hara-Wild

Patrick Li is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Econometrics and Business Analytics, Monash University. He is currently working on automated visual inference using computer vision model with Di Cook and Emi Tanaka. His research interests are machine learning, computer vision, data visualisation and statistical software development.

Github 

Preparation

The workshop will cover the basics of creating shiny web applications. There is no need for prior experience in website development or shiny is required to get the most out of this workshop. Familiarity with writing R code is expected, and being comfortable with using tidyverse packages including dplyr and ggplot2 would be beneficial. If you are unfamiliar with writing R code or using the tidyverse, consider working through the learnr materials here: https://learnr.numbat.space/.

A shinyapps.io account is needed to deploy your app to https://www.shinyapps.io/ in session 3 (but is not required if you just want to watch this part).

Required equipment

Just a computer capable of running R and an internet connection! 💻

This workshop will be ran online, so no other equipment is needed.

Required software

To be able to complete the exercises of this workshop, please make sure to install a suitable IDE (such as RStudio), a recent version of R (4.1+) and the following packages. In order to deploy your app using docker, you will need to install docker from https://docs.docker.com/desktop/

  • Shiny packages and extensions
    • shiny, shinythemes, echarts4r
  • tidyverse packages and friends
    • ggplot2, readr, tibble, dplyr, tidyr, stringr, forcats

Run this code to install the packages if needed:

packages <- c(
  "shiny", "shinythemes", "echarts4r",
  "ggplot2", "readr", "tibble", "tidyr", "stringr", "forcats"
)

install.packages(setdiff(packages, rownames(installed.packages())))