There is topic I want discuss with everyone! The shiny is very popular R framework to quickly build a interactively webserver. But I have checked some webserver built by shiny ,and I find some shortcoming of these webserver. like wait too long time to open a website. occasionally lost connect to server need reload.?So I want to discuss about the comparison of convention webserver build method like php. what is shortcoming of webserver build by shiny framework?
The wait time to start a shiny app could be due to it being served from underpowered resources or to the time it takes to spin up their container/VM if hosted in some cloud.
Lost connections to public shiny apps are likely caused by the time out setting of the shiny server used to serve these apps.
Shiny makes it easy to develop an app around some R code compared to building a web site using more conventional approaches or frameworks in other languages, at least for beginners, mostly because it hides the setting up of a web server and makes it easy to build UIs on top of code/data without previous knowledge of HTML/CSS/javascript.
I find shiny great as a way of distributing desktop apps and for quickly putting a UI on top of R code.
However, some of the negative points for me (within my limited experience of shiny, some experts may beg to differ) are:
shiny should be limited to small projects because the structure and the way it works make it difficult to work with a large code base (even with modules)
enabling complex interactions between multiple elements is difficult to manage consistently
having users create/modify data is not straightforward
you quickly end up writing some HTML/CSS/javascript inside your R code, leading to maintainability issues
So as usual, it's a matter of using the right tool for the right job and how much resources can be devoted to a given task.
For a complex public-facing web site, I wouldn't use shiny.
Thank you ! Your opinion is valuable!