Creating web applications in R using Shiny

Reto Zihlmann, ETH Zurich

Novice and advanced R users from all professional groups.

• CHF 400.- for members of UZH/ETH and associated institutes
• CHF 600.- for alumni of UZH/ETH, members of other universities, the public sector and non-profit organizations
• CHF 800.- for companies

Persons without current employment can register for the UZH/ETH fee upon request.

You are a researcher and want to present your collected data to a broad audience in an interactive way? Or you built a data pipeline for your company and want people to be able to use it with an easy graphical user interface?

Shiny is an R package that allows you to build interactive web applications. It is relatively easy to learn and does not require deeper programming experience with HTML, CSS or JavaScript. Like most R packages, Shiny is primarily used for data processing and presentation. Examples of Shiny apps can be found at https://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/

This 1-day course is an introduction to the Shiny framework. You will learn the most important concepts of Shiny by building lots of example apps. We assume no prior knowledge with Shiny but a basic background in R (as acquired in an introductory course on R).

In this course you will

• have a look at the structure of a Shiny application with the frontend user interface and the backend server functions.
• improve the user experience and look of the Shiny user interface with HTML, themes, control widgets and reactive output (plots, tables, text, downloads).
• learn the basic concepts of reactive programming.
• improve your workflow in writing Shiny apps.
• write your own Shiny app which allows to interactively
• inspect a data set using plots and tables.
• share or deploy a Shiny app on shinyapps.io

As an end result you should understand the basic principles of an Shiny app and be able to build and deploy a simple app.