R Shiny 2 Minute Overview
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How does Shiny work?
Having a general understanding of this can really help you to be more effective at building applications.
A shiny application consists of two key components: a server that runs your R code and a user interface or UI that runs through a user's web browser.
The UI will contain a layout which can place input fields and outputs such as visualizations.
Input fields are things like text boxes drop-down menus and calendar controls that send their values back to the R server. The R server then updates its calculations and visualizations which get sent back to the UI to be displayed.
It's important to note that Shiny applications always need a server running R to work when you deploy your applications this will either be somewhere on the internet or somewhere on your network. If you have R installed on your computer R can launch a mini web server to run the application just on your computer. This is what happens every time we run an app in our course examples. This can be a quick and easy way to share your application with other users without setting up a server but won't work if people don't have R plus the necessary libraries installed.
In the next video we'll take a look at my favorite new R package that makes building Shiny applications even faster easier and more flexible.