Development of interactive biological web applications with R/Shiny. Issue 1 (12th October 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Jia, Lihua; Yao, Wen; Jiang, Yingru; Li, Yang; Wang, Zhizhan; Li, Haoran; Huang, Fangfang; Li, Jiaming; Chen, Tiantian; Zhang, Huiyong
• Is Part Of: Briefings in bioinformatics. Volume 23:Issue 1(2022)
• Publication Date: 2021-10-12
• Subjects: biological web application development -- web server -- biological database -- data analysis -- R -- Shiny; Genetics -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Molecular biology -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Genomes -- Data processing -- Periodicals; 572.80285
• DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbab415
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1467-5463

Abstract

Abstract: Development of interactive web applications to deposit, visualize and analyze biological datasets is a major subject of bioinformatics. R is a programming language for data science, which is also one of the most popular languages used in biological data analysis and bioinformatics. However, building interactive web applications was a great challenge for R users before the Shiny package was developed by the RStudio company in 2012. By compiling R code into HTML, CSS and JavaScript code, Shiny has made it incredibly easy to build web applications for the large R community in bioinformatics and for even non-programmers. Over 470 biological web applications have been developed with R/Shiny up to now. To further promote the utilization of R/Shiny, we reviewed the development of biological web applications with R/Shiny, including eminent biological web applications built with R/Shiny, basic steps to build an R/Shiny application, commonly used R packages to build the interface and server of R/Shiny applications, deployment of R/Shiny applications in the cloud and online resources for R/Shiny.