R : GUIs fast to launch (alternatives to shiny ?)

user_11804656 0
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I am trying to make some GUI for my CRAN package

  1. some f function that locally launches a popup with a few params rendering a few outputs, like launching locally a simple shiny app.
  2. the popup permits to select the parameters easily and then a "validate" button triggers the return of fwith the selected parameters, like shiny with stopApp

I have already done that with shiny but i think the result is a bit unsatisfying because shiny apps are slow to launch and stop (if there is an object to serialize i guess).

I have seen that some packages, like vdiffr, seem to answer this problem by making a list of the objects to change, thus they only launch shiny once to change everything with some selecter. If possible I'd like to avoid this solution.

So the question is : is there some kind of GUI framework more convenient than Shiny for this (only local, fast launch and fast return) ? Or some fine way to do that, that is light enough (I don't want to make my package to be extraordinary heavy for a small popup) ?

shiny r frameworks user-interface
2 Answers

Here are GUI facilities that come with R (no packages needed):

(1) For sufficiently simple applications select.list, menu, readline, file.choose and choose.dir can be used and will present with a text or graphical user interface depending on what environment the user has. These all come with R and launch very quickly and are easy to program. See the help pages of those commands and try:

select.list(c("oranges", "apples", "pears"))
menu(c("oranges", "apples", "pears"))
readline("Enter name of fruit: ")
choose.dir()
file.choose()

(2) A possibility which is capable of user interfaces as sophisticated as shiny is the tcltk package. This comes with R so it does not need to be installed. It only needs to be loaded using a library statement. (If a user builds R from source then it is possible to build it without tcltk capability but in 99% of all cases tcltk will be present).

There are a few short examples of R source code employing tcltk here: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~s133/Gui-a.html, quite a few more examples at James Wettenhall's site and one can run the Rcmdr R package to see an example of a sophisticated tcltk user interface although running Rcmdr will take longer to load than a simple application due to its large size.

Because tcltk is a part of R itself it does not have a CRAN page but for additional packages that use tcltk look at the reverse dependencies of the tcltk2 package at the bottom of its CRAN page since any package that depends on it must also use tcltk.

user_5165480

That really depends on your coding knowledge. My first approach, however, would be to try to improve your shiny app. For that you can use the profvis package to check why exactly your shiny app is slow. Should you decide to stay with Shiny, there a lot of ways on how to reduce the starting time of Shiny. However, if you should come to the conclusion, that you really want to throw shiny overboard, then you should consider using JavaScript.

  • Either you write your complete app in pure JavaScript
  • Or you can use JavaScript within Shiny (e.g. r2d3)

Of course there are other ways as @Pork Chop mentioned of using rmarkdown or normal markdown.

user_115025030
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