Chapter 2. Building Your First Application

In the previous chapter, we looked at R, learned some of its basic syntax, and saw some examples of the power and flexibility that R and Shiny offer. This chapter introduces the basics of Shiny. In this chapter, we're going to build our own application to interactively query results from the Google Analytics API. We will cover the following topics:

• The basic structure of a Shiny program

• The selection of simple input widgets (checkboxes and radio buttons)

• The selection of simple output types (rendering plots and returning text)

• The selection of simple layout types (page with sidebar and tabbed output panel)

• Handling reactivity in Shiny

• A brief summary of more advanced layout features