The Past and Future of Shiny Keynote at rstudio::conf(2022)

Nan Xiao August 17, 2022 2 min read

I constantly feel lucky to witness the growth of the R web framework, Shiny, in the past ten years. In his keynote speech at rstudio::conf 2022, Joe Cheng shared an excellent summary of Shiny’s achievements and exciting outlook.

I am deeply moved by the story about how Shiny was created and Joe’s journey, and I recommend you watch the talk recording below if you haven’t. Notably, after Hadley’s Mastering Shiny book, the community-maintained awesome list awesome-shiny-extensions was again highlighted in Joe’s talk from 24:00 to 24:33 (thanks so much for the shout-out!).

Timestamps

0:00 Introduction
1:45 10th anniversary of Shiny
2:35 How Shiny started
6:07 Why UI programming sucks
8:33 Meteor
11:44 The birth of Shiny
13:05 A personal story
16:53 Seven weeks later
18:20 Team Shiny, 2012
18:50 Three big questions
20:20 Q: Are R users ready to write web apps?
23:04 Q: Will the R community respond?
28:06 Q: Can we even build it in R?
35:28 Three big questions, answered!
35:57 Introducing Shiny for Python
39:18 Shiny for Python example: air mass calculator
40:48 Editor support for Shiny for Python
41:35 Deployment options for Shiny for Python
44:20 The future of Shiny is R and Python
44:40 Visual editor for Shiny UI
46:11 shinytest2
47:00 Team Shiny, 2022
48:28 Q&A

A heartfelt thank you, to Joe Cheng, Team Shiny, and all the developers in the community, for developing and extending this framework that helps numerous people create incredible interactive web experiences every day.