ShinyWYSIWYG: a Shiny What You See Is What You Get editor

CLAUDIO VARGAS ROJAS; JUAN C RODRIGUEZ; ELMER A FERNÁNDEZ

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; LatinR 2018 | Latinamerican Conference About the Use of R in R&D; 2018

SADIO

For any computer application, having a graphical user inter-face (GUI) potentially increases its usability and scope. In the case ofthe R language, one of the most used alternatives is theShiny[1] library.Shinyis an R package that facilitates the creation of interactive web ap-plications directly from R. However, usingShinyrequires a certain levelof knowledge of R programming. Looking at CRAN?s Task Views, it iseasy to note that the R community brings together a variety of specialistsin various fields such as biologists, agronomists, economists, among oth-ers. It is therefore crucial that R development tools maximize the levelof programmatic simplicity to ease the start of the learning ramp. Inorder to further facilitate the process of developing a user-friendly GUI,and tackling this learning gap, here we present theShinyWYSIWYGapplication.ShinyWYSIWYGis a visual editor that allows the user, using thedragand droptechnique, inserting the various fields thatShinyprovides asinput and output, by selecting the desired size and position for each field.Once the user interface is generated,ShinyWYSIWYGalso eases thedevelopment of the server logic. For each event that the user wishes togenerate, the input field that triggers the action must be specified, thecode to be executed, the input variables that it will use, and if desired,which is the output field where the results will be rendered.ShinyWYSI-WYGalso allows using global variables and adding code that must beexecuted before running the server (application?s global code).Once the GUI design is complete,ShinyWYSIWYGprovides the com-plete R code that generates it. Then the user should only have to copyand paste the code and run its Shiny application.ShinyWYSIWYGalsoallows loading previously saved projects.ShinyWYSIWYGis entirely developed in R using theShiny,ggplot2,andshinyjslibraries. It works independently of R andShinyversions. It isfreely available at github.com/jcrodriguez1989/shinyWYSIWYG, whereis also an example to recreate, byShinyWYSIWYG,theShiny?01hello?application.