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We use R and Shiny server pro for our back-end. It's hosted on AWS EB with our static site on S3. We love it - the data scientists can write and push features d

We use R and Shiny server pro for our back-end. It's hosted on AWS EB with our static site on S3. We love it - the data scientists can write and push features directly, and everything (including our API's) are easily maintainable in R. I've been shouting the praise of R and it's usefulness as a production ready language for a long time. Contact me with questions about data science, start ups, or R - if you have a data backed start up, R + Shiny is the way to go.

btreecat 12y ago
Last time I checked out shiny (about 8-12 months ago) it was still useless beyond the most trivial examples. Building an actual website that would be public facing seemed like a horrid idea at the time. Have they really come that far in such a short time? Personally if I wanted to use R I could just interface with it from another language (Python, .Net, Java etc.) I haven't played enough with R recently to make an informed opinion on the current quality of its network libs and framework stack however it seems like an interesting gamble (that's paying off for you all?) given where the focus of the R community has been (statistical programming rather than general use) and statements on the front page of "No web development skills are required."
- JasonCEC 12y ago
  Shiny has a full time team working startup hours on it - it's out of beta and has enterprise support (Shiny server pro). It's come a long way to put it mildly; and we've never had a problem using it in production. We could interface R with another language if we needed to... but we're a data-science company, and unlike many other co's or startups out there, we hire data-scientists who write features and applications directly. R makes this possible. We have an Android App as part of our services - we use RServe as the API interface so we can call R functions from the App. To your other point - web development skills are most definitely required, as are good engineering practices, and a stable stack. Shiny is just like any other framework; it takes a range of skills to create an application people want to use and pay for.

btreecat 12y ago

Last time I checked out shiny (about 8-12 months ago) it was still useless beyond the most trivial examples. Building an actual website that would be public facing seemed like a horrid idea at the time. Have they really come that far in such a short time? Personally if I wanted to use R I could just interface with it from another language (Python, .Net, Java etc.) I haven't played enough with R recently to make an informed opinion on the current quality of its network libs and framework stack however it seems like an interesting gamble (that's paying off for you all?) given where the focus of the R community has been (statistical programming rather than general use) and statements on the front page of "No web development skills are required."

JasonCEC 12y ago
Shiny has a full time team working startup hours on it - it's out of beta and has enterprise support (Shiny server pro). It's come a long way to put it mildly; and we've never had a problem using it in production. We could interface R with another language if we needed to... but we're a data-science company, and unlike many other co's or startups out there, we hire data-scientists who write features and applications directly. R makes this possible. We have an Android App as part of our services - we use RServe as the API interface so we can call R functions from the App. To your other point - web development skills are most definitely required, as are good engineering practices, and a stable stack. Shiny is just like any other framework; it takes a range of skills to create an application people want to use and pay for.