Shiny is a package for the R
programming environment that makes it possible to develop and run interactive web applications from within an active R
session. Each of the Shiny apps archived here provides a focused introduction to a topic of importance to analytical chemistry, covering an amount of material equivalent to one section of a chapter or one figure found in a typical textbook. Applications are run in a browser either remotely using shinyapps.io as a hosting service, or locally using a computer with R
installed; details on both methods are outlined below.
The easiest way to explore a Shiny app is to use the app link, which runs the app remotely using the shinyapps.io server as this does not require a local installation of R
or the Shiny package. At present, the hosting of apps at shinyapps.io is through a basic account that limits the amount of monthly usage of the apps; if you cannot access one of these apps at shinyapps.io, try running the app locally on a computer running R
.
The following Shiny apps are under development and their titles are shared here with minimal descriptions; although links to the code is provided, these are works in progress and there is no guarantee that the code or the apps are fully functional.
To run a Shiny app locally you must have R
and the Shiny package installed on your computer. To install R
, first go the website www.r-project.org and click on the link to CRAN on the left side of the page under the heading "Downloads." Scroll through the list of CRAN mirror sites and click on a link to a site located in your region. Select the link in the "Download and Install R
" box at the top of the page that is appropriate for your operating system and follow the directions. To install the Shiny package, launch R
and type install.packages("shiny")
at the command prompt; this will download and install the Shiny package and other packages required by Shiny. Installing a package does not make the package immediately available to you; to make the package available any R
session, type load("shiny")
at the command prompt. Finally, to run the app, use the code link and follow the instructions in the app's readme file; in general, the command is shiny::runGitHub("name of app","dtharvey")
.