5 ms·

I still don't know who Shiny is for... For very small organizations? You'd be a fool to run Shiny in a place over even just a couple hundred people... I've neve

by th0ma5 7y ago

I still don't know who Shiny is for... For very small organizations? You'd be a fool to run Shiny in a place over even just a couple hundred people... I've never seen any kind of seriousness around denial of service, pen testing, end to end data security, etc. If you're smart enough to be using Shiny to make something really great, you should also be smart enough to understand the risks of web applications. And I could also add with Shiny are you providing analysis or an illusion of an analysis platform with a risk of misinterpretation? The best fit seems to be demoing work during a presentation or similar with it running locally... Where you can move some sliders and discuss some scenarios. Anything more than that and Shiny seems to promise you a turn key solution to weakly understood risks.

nerdponx 7y ago
A few use cases I've personally experienced: 1. Demo during presentation on a local server (as you suggested) 2. Demo during presentation on someone else's computer without R installed 3. Quick-and-dirty dashboard for non-technical colleagues, hosted on an on-prem server 4. Simple GUI interface to some kind of R functionality (as seen here) It's definitely not some kind of universal tool. But it comes in handy and I'm grateful that it exists.
ende 7y ago
> The best fit seems to be demoing work during a presentation or similar with it running locally... Where you can move some sliders and discuss some scenarios. Yeah, you got it. It’s basically good for prototyping, or throwing some light interaction onto a plot, etc. My audience is typically either myself, or maybe putting something light weight into a colleague’s hands.
mr_t 7y ago
I don't quite get why someone would be a fool to run Shiny. Can you elaborate on that?
- tomecki 7y ago
  Fool is a tough word. IMHO it's terrific how quickly you can go from an idea to a local dashboard, but on the other hand it's non-trivial to get it from the one-person dashboard to a >1000 user production application with some uptime guarantees, authorization, metrics, error collection.
  - jointpdf 7y ago
    What about ShinyProxy for this purpose (“productionizing”)? https://www.shinyproxy.io/ https://www.shinyproxy.io/
    - tomecki 7y ago
      This is one potential solution. Good read on scaling shiny: https://appsilon.com/alternatives-to-scaling-shiny/ https://appsilon.com/alternatives-to-scaling-shiny/
firenzeduomo 7y ago
I think there can definitely be a niche where Shiny fits. For example, most web frameworks are not necessarily designed to share data sets and related analysis among many users. As data becomes more and more valuable you can expect Shiny to play an important role in such data sharing platforms. Currently this is mostly seen within large institutions.
aBioGuy 7y ago
It's popular with scientists (genomics) for making web portals to interactively share data / plots / analyses. The number of users to such sites is (often) measured in dozens of people per day. I'm a bioinformatician, not a web developer, and Shiny has been a great tool to share my work with something I'm already familiar with (R). (I'd share a site I've made with Shiny but I'm pretty certain it'd explode with hundreds of concurrent visitors - but that's OK! I get dozens of visitors a day and don't expect any more)
RocketSyntax 7y ago
Genomics. Massive pharma companies use R and use RStudio Connect for applet platforms. Python needs a version of Shiny that works with Django.
RosanaAnaDana 7y ago
In my shop regularly develop and deploy shiny apps for 'micro-tasks' that are scripted under the hood, for providing a project management GUI, control tasking and work tracking, etc. All of our apps run locally, only. Since we go through many 'small' contracts, and each one can be pretty different. Retooling a shiny app to do another job so that the PM's can keep track and manage their swarm takes a few hours, but frankly, it keeps the nerf's herded. The overhead of spinning off a new shiny app is so low, its pretty nice.
bubbab 7y ago
It's a web application framework for R, not a turnkey solution or an analysis platform. It's for R users who want an easy way to build a web app in R without having to know much about web development or other languages. If you want to productionize your web app, you could put it behind a reverse proxy, add authentication, etc. just like with any other web framework. The turnkey solution would be products that do this, like Shiny Server and ShinyProxy.
mr_toad 7y ago
> For very small organizations? For small parts of large organisations. I’ve only ever seen it deployed internally, and the clients/users are usually a small subset of the organisation.

by th0ma5 7y ago

nerdponx 7y ago

A few use cases I've personally experienced: 1. Demo during presentation on a local server (as you suggested) 2. Demo during presentation on someone else's computer without R installed 3. Quick-and-dirty dashboard for non-technical colleagues, hosted on an on-prem server 4. Simple GUI interface to some kind of R functionality (as seen here) It's definitely not some kind of universal tool. But it comes in handy and I'm grateful that it exists.

ende 7y ago

> The best fit seems to be demoing work during a presentation or similar with it running locally... Where you can move some sliders and discuss some scenarios. Yeah, you got it. It’s basically good for prototyping, or throwing some light interaction onto a plot, etc. My audience is typically either myself, or maybe putting something light weight into a colleague’s hands.

mr_t 7y ago

I don't quite get why someone would be a fool to run Shiny. Can you elaborate on that?

tomecki 7y ago
Fool is a tough word. IMHO it's terrific how quickly you can go from an idea to a local dashboard, but on the other hand it's non-trivial to get it from the one-person dashboard to a >1000 user production application with some uptime guarantees, authorization, metrics, error collection.
- jointpdf 7y ago
  What about ShinyProxy for this purpose (“productionizing”)? https://www.shinyproxy.io/ https://www.shinyproxy.io/
  - tomecki 7y ago
    This is one potential solution. Good read on scaling shiny: https://appsilon.com/alternatives-to-scaling-shiny/ https://appsilon.com/alternatives-to-scaling-shiny/

firenzeduomo 7y ago

I think there can definitely be a niche where Shiny fits. For example, most web frameworks are not necessarily designed to share data sets and related analysis among many users. As data becomes more and more valuable you can expect Shiny to play an important role in such data sharing platforms. Currently this is mostly seen within large institutions.

aBioGuy 7y ago

It's popular with scientists (genomics) for making web portals to interactively share data / plots / analyses. The number of users to such sites is (often) measured in dozens of people per day. I'm a bioinformatician, not a web developer, and Shiny has been a great tool to share my work with something I'm already familiar with (R). (I'd share a site I've made with Shiny but I'm pretty certain it'd explode with hundreds of concurrent visitors - but that's OK! I get dozens of visitors a day and don't expect any more)

RocketSyntax 7y ago

Genomics. Massive pharma companies use R and use RStudio Connect for applet platforms. Python needs a version of Shiny that works with Django.

RosanaAnaDana 7y ago

In my shop regularly develop and deploy shiny apps for 'micro-tasks' that are scripted under the hood, for providing a project management GUI, control tasking and work tracking, etc. All of our apps run locally, only. Since we go through many 'small' contracts, and each one can be pretty different. Retooling a shiny app to do another job so that the PM's can keep track and manage their swarm takes a few hours, but frankly, it keeps the nerf's herded. The overhead of spinning off a new shiny app is so low, its pretty nice.

bubbab 7y ago

It's a web application framework for R, not a turnkey solution or an analysis platform. It's for R users who want an easy way to build a web app in R without having to know much about web development or other languages. If you want to productionize your web app, you could put it behind a reverse proxy, add authentication, etc. just like with any other web framework. The turnkey solution would be products that do this, like Shiny Server and ShinyProxy.

mr_toad 7y ago

> For very small organizations? For small parts of large organisations. I’ve only ever seen it deployed internally, and the clients/users are usually a small subset of the organisation.