Basics

They provide rich JavaScript data visualizations. Some are useful, others are gadgets.

We can render htmlwidgets (including Leaflet) in any HTML output. We can publish R Markdown Websites or blogs with blogdown. We can build a Flexdashboard. We can publish a book with bookdown. And so on.

These tools seamlessly integrate interactive htmlwidgets along with static tabulating, charting, and mapping visualizations (and optionally use Shiny to drive visualizations dynamically).

The widgets that are worth the trip:

  • Leaflet (works with Shiny).
  • dygraphs (works with Shiny).
  • plotly (works with Shiny).
  • rbokeh (?).
  • Highcharter (works with Shiny).
  • DataTables (works with Shiny).

In addition, ggvis can work with Shiny.

Supplements

Other widgets to consider:

  • visNetwork; drawing timelines.
  • networkD3; drawing dendrograms of different shapes.
  • leaflet.minicharts; provides functions to add small charts (bar, pie, and polar charts) on interactive maps
  • formattable; applying formatting on vectors and data frames (similar to Excel conditional formatting).
  • ggiraph; an extension to ggplot2, making interactive graphics.
  • wordcloud2.
  • tmap; an mapping extension to ggplot2; maps can become interactive with Leaflet.
  • Handsontable.js; drawing sparklines in minimalist Excel-like data grid editor.
  • pairsD3; drawing 3D scatterplot matrices or splom.
  • d3Tree; drawing collapsible decision trees.
  • collapsibleTree; drawing collapsible decision trees.