Chapter 5. Advanced Applications I – Dashboards

This chapter is all about laying out your Shiny applications. In Chapter 3, Building Your Own Web Pages with Shiny, we already looked at doing it by hand, using HTML or CSS, and we already saw how to lay out multiple output windows using tabsetPanel(). Shiny (and its associated packages) includes loads of functions that allow you to lay out your applications beautifully and simply. This chapter takes the code and applications you have already seen and takes them from the very plain, vanilla-looking layout that the default styling returns to slick, customizable layouts, culminating in your very own Google Analytics dashboard.

In this chapter, we will do the following things:

• Revise the basics of layout in Shiny applications and look at simple ways of extending the basic layout functions

• Add icons to the applications

• Learn about the bootstrap layout functions, which enable you to very easily lay applications out using a grid

• Change the look and feel...