比较Shiny / rmarkdown :: render_site（）和flexdashboard

Question

A high level question from someone new to the activity of building websites based on R code:

I am trying to understand the relationship between Shiny and the facilities offered by rmarkdown to render interactive and/or web content (eg, using rmarkdown::render_site() , flexdashboard ).

What triggered this question is reading on the rmarkdown documentation that:

R Markdown documents are a perfect platform for interactive content.

Plus seeing these great dashboards made with flexdashboard .

To navigate the various options available to building websites based on R code, I would like to know:

1. how Shiny articulates with the capabilities offered by rmarkdown ?

2. how Shiny programming compares, in terms of ease/scalability/flexibility, with rmarkdown / flexdashboard ?

I have done a fairly big shiny app and want to know whether I should try to migrate to eg, flexdahboard .

Answer 1

Shiny came first, and after a while they added some of shiny's capabilities to markdown. In order to use interactive markdowns, notice that you need to use runtime: shiny which means that it DOES need shiny to run on the backend, it's no longer than a pure standalone HTML document.

However, what I just said doesn't explain anything about what you asked, just wanted to point that out! This is indeed a great question, and there is an open issue on shiny's github to try to explain the difference between them, and other similar formats, because I agree it's very overwhelming to see all these options and have to choose which one to go with. Just to add to the complexity - you can in fact write/embed shiny apps inside Rmd documents :)

(I couldn't submit this as a comment because it's too long)