Joe Cheng

Shiny Programming Practices || Joe Cheng || Posit

Have you ever wanted to sit down and talk with Joe Cheng, the creator of Shiny and CTO of Posit (RStudio) and ask him how he approaches programming? Look no further - we’ve got that conversation for you right here!

Shiny makes it easy to build interactive web apps straight from R or Python. You can host standalone apps on a webpage or embed them in Markdown-style documents or build dashboards. You can also extend your Shiny apps with CSS themes, htmlwidgets, and JavaScript actions.

Joe Cheng | Styling Shiny apps with Sass and Bootstrap 4 | Posit (2020)

Customizing the style–fonts, colors, margins, spacing–of Shiny apps has always been possible, but never as easy as we’d like it to be. Canned themes like those in the shinythemes package can easily make apps look slightly less generic, but that’s small consolation if your goal is to match the visual style of your university, corporation, or client.

In theory, one can “just” use CSS to customize the appearance of your Shiny app, the same as any other web application. But in practice, the use of large CSS frameworks like Bootstrap means significant CSS expertise is required to comprehensively change the look of an app.

Relief is on the way. As part of a round of upgrades to Shiny’s UI, we’ve made fundamental changes to the way R users can interact with CSS, using new R packages we’ve created around Sass and Bootstrap 4. In this talk, we’ll show some of the features of these packages and tell you how you can take advantage of them in your apps.

Joe Cheng | Shiny in production: Principles, practices, and tools | RStudio (2019)

Shiny is a web framework for R, a language not traditionally known for web frameworks, to say the least. As such, Shiny has always faced questions about whether it can or should be used “in production”. In this talk we’ll explore what “production” even means, review some of the historical obstacles and objections to using Shiny for production purposes, and discuss practices and tools that can help your Shiny apps flourish.