5 Web Server Insights That Makes You a Better R Shiny Developer
Ever wonder what’s the engine behind a Shiny web application? Simply put: a web server that serves user requests.
Like a car, you don’t need to understand the internal working of the engine to drive. Similarly, that is also the case with web development in Shiny with regards to its server.
However, understanding how the web server works, improves your Shiny web development drastrically in terms of performance, coding and debugging errors.
5 Key Shiny’s Web server insights:
1. The Core Functionality of Shiny’s Web Server
The core functionality of a Shiny Web Server consists of
- input
- reactive expressions
- and output.
Input is a visual html element (node) living in the web browser with which a user interacts with. The value of the input is sent as a request to the web server after a trigger by a user. Typical input elements are checkboxes, input boxes, combo boxes etc
The Shiny Web Server listens continually to these input requests, and responds in executing reactive expressions dependent on these inputs, and finally rendering html output, like this code…
