Comment by Gethsemane 2 days ago
Shiny is an R package that is quite popular for building data analysis web tools, I suppose this would be a useful extension for it! Despite R tending to give people 'the ick' it regardless seems to have become quite a solid platform for building web apps
I agree that it's perhaps not the most robust choice, but at least for my field (bioinformatics) it's a good balance between accessibility and performance. That being said, in most cases when I come across a paper >1 year old presenting the latest-and-greatest Shiny web app, it is wholey broken when I try to use it :|
Is it because they stopped paying for Shinyapps.io? Or they exhausted the free usage monthly quota. In my experience these are the common reasons. If they did not update the app, there is no reason for it stop working. I have apps running fine and they were created 3-4 years ago.
Shiny is a great package. Not unlike R (and PHP back in the day) it was made by people that were not necessarily great programmers who wanted something to get up and running quickly. Lowering the bar to entry made sacrifices to performance, security, and consistency. However, you can punch above your weight class if you're a researcher who barely knows R and Python with Shiny.
That being said, if you're investing time to learn React and dealing with all its pitfalls to use with R, you might as well just go all in with React at that point.
I wouldn’t want to deploy a Shjny app externally (although loads of people seem to do so with no problems) but for internal tools it’s incredible. You can make reactive dashboards and analysis tools with no plumbing - just refer to an input when specifying your charts/outputs and they will be automatically plumbed and update automatically.