Developing Shiny apps using Docker

R is a programming language initially developed to handle statistical computing and graphics. However throughout the years a lot of new features and packages have been added, offering the users more tools to create whole environments. One example of this is the package Shiny: a framework for building web applications using R. Shiny applications are a powerful and easy way to share and communicate your analysis and let people interact with it. What many R users don’t know about is that it is possible to build enterprise applications and put them in production using Shiny. Reliability is our main objective when we deploy services in production. Imagine you are working on an analysis in R and you send your code to a friend. Your friend runs exactly this code on exactly the same dataset but receives a slightly different result. This can have various reasons such as a different operating system or a different version of an R package. A solution for this problem is Docker! In this talk, We’ll focus on good habits and frameworks to deploy and share our Shiny applications, introducing Docker.