The htmlwidgets package

The htmlwidgets package is the magic sauce that makes all of the packages in this chapter work. Essentially, it allows package developers to very easily produce bindings between JavaScript visualization libraries and R. If you wish to make use of the htmlwidgets package to produce a binding to your own favorite JavaScript library, then it is a relatively simple process, details of which can be found at http://www.htmlwidgets.org/develop_intro.html. We will not look at the process of producing your own bindings because many popular libraries are available, and there are plenty in this chapter that demonstrate the use of existing libraries. Moreover, it requires competence with JavaScript, which is not assumed in this book. We can say that the htmlwidgets package makes it easy to use JavaScript visualization libraries from R, including R Markdown documents and Shiny applications.

In this chapter, we will build a large, multi-tabbed Shiny application to show off some...