Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps

Colin Fay has written the vast majority of this book. He’s responsible for its general structure, and for the original designer of the workflow described. Most of the time (if not every time) “we” actually refers to him. He is the lead developer of the {golem} framework, and creator of many tools described in this book. Colin works at ThinkR, a french agency focused on everything R-related. During the day, he helps companies to take full advantage of the power of R, by building tools (packages, web apps…) and setting up infrastructure. His main areas of expertise are data & software engineering, infrastructure, web applications (front-end and back-end), and R in production. During the night, Colin is also an hyperactive open source developer and an open data advocate. You can find a lot of his work on his GitHub account (https://github.com/ColinFay) and on ThinkR’s account (https://github.com/thinkr-open). He is also active in the R & Data community, and an international speaker. Sébastien Rochette has been instrumental in the review of most of this book chapters. He has also written the section about prototyping in RMarkdown, a concept he initiated. Sébastien is a data scientist at ThinkR, where he teaches anything R related from beginner to expert level, guides R developers towards implementation of best practices, and creates tailor-made R solutions for the needs of his customers. Vincent Guyader is the founder of ThinkR. He created the first proof-of-concept of a framework for {shiny} applications inside packages ; an idea which has led to the creation of {golem}. If you feel like a GitHub archaeologist, this very first version is still available with a little bit of exploration! With more than 10 years of experience with R, and a scientific and technical background, Vincent is an R-enthusiast. He still has his hands in the code, whether to develop applications, analyze data or build packages. When he’s not coding, he plays with Docker and manages servers. He strongly believes that meeting highly technical challenges is not incompatible with pedagogy: he passionately trains very diverse learner profiles at R. Cervan Girard has worked on some of the example applications that are used inside this book, namely {shinipsumdemo}, {databasedemo}, {graysacle}, {bs4dashdemo}, and {shinyfuture}. Cervan is Data Scientist at ThinkR. He is enthusiastic and motivated when it comes to rolling up his sleeves for new challenges, even if it means venturing dangerously into the depths of R, learning new languages and experimenting outside your comfort zone. Whatever the challenge, he remains reliable, constructive and efficient when it comes to using his skills to train or develop. He also enjoys training learners of all levels in the R language.

1. About Successful Shiny Apps. 2. Planning Ahead. 3. Structuring your Project. 4. Introduction to {golem}. 5. The workflow. 6. UX Matters. 7. Don’t rush into coding. 8. Setting up for success with {golem} (#settingupsuccess). 9. Building an “ipsum-app”. 10. Building the app with {golem} 11. Build yourself a safety net. 12. Version Control. 13. Deploy your application. 14. The Need for Optimization. 15. Common Application Caveats. 16. Optimizing {shiny} Code. 17. Using JavaScript. 18. A Gentle Introduction to CSS. Appendix.