The other day I was looking through my RSS feeds and noticed a blog post about the new package Shiny from the amazing people who brought us Rstudio. I was in a procrastinatory mood, and so justified to my self that a quick try at using the package would be entirely reasonable (despite being in the final year of my PhD, with a mountain of lab work still to do).
I downloaded and installed the package using the instruction provided at http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/. Having developed the diveRsity R package, I was quickly interested in how easy It would be to produce a fully functional web app for one of my functions.
The answer, pretty damn easy!
After about 30 minutes of playing around with the simple examples provided with the package, I was confident that I could produce a slick web app with minimal effort. I was right. I simply wrote two small code files and voila, The diveRsity online web app was born. Unfortunately the shiny package does not support online hosting of web apps currently (but wispers are afoot that this service may be available in the future), so users will have to follow the instruction provided here to run diveRsity online on their own system.
I am truly impressed with the shiny package. I can just imagine the potential it holds for teaching.