In answer to your question -- my sense is that you can spin up super nice dashboards using shiny, and those will be opinionated HTTP interfaces. If you want to

In answer to your question -- my sense is that you can spin up super nice dashboards using shiny, and those will be opinionated HTTP interfaces. If you want to combine the flexibility of a bonafide web framework, and R shiny dashboards, you're going to have a rough time. R shiny itself has a pretty rough HTTP implementation built in. So I'd say the answer is yes, and you'll have a good time as long you only need the HTTP interface to do certain things (responsive dashboards; and do them well!). Webserver implementations exist in R, but don't have near the time / attention put into them as with Python.