From the course: Creating Interactive Presentations with Shiny and R

Why use Shiny?

From the course: Creating Interactive Presentations with Shiny and R

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Why use Shiny?

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- [Voiceover] So why use Shiny? You might be interested in using Shiny because you want to make an interactive application which allows people to explore a data set of yours or to understand a model that you've built inside of R, and its dependency on different parameters. And that's what Shiny's for, for making interactive data visualizations and applications using the R language. So, before we use Shiny, we should understand what is Shiny? Well, it's a framework for building interactive applications using the R language. It's an R library installed on your local machine for creating interactive apps. And it's also a server side application. This might sound quite technical, but it's not. We essentially think of there being two different places that we might want to use a Shiny application. We might want to use a Shiny application on our local machine, or through the web browser. So if you've written a Shiny app to visualize your data interactively, and you want to show that in a conference presentation, then you may want to leave it on your local machine. In that case, all you need is RStudio and the R library, Shiny. And you can have a local instance of your Shiny app. If, however, you want to make your Shiny app available to other people through the web browser, then you'd need to use a hosting platform, like shinyapps.io, that has the the Shiny Server Application installed on it. So, in summary, Shiny's really useful if you have R script or visualization that you want to make interactive. Shiny apps can be hosted online and be shared with the world easily if you use a hosting platform like shinyapps.io, and there's no need to learn HTML or JavaScript to make quite attractive interactive visualization and applications.

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