Yihui Xie is a creative software engineer who works at RStudio. His R packages are innovative and useful.
1. shiny.
Shiny enables you to build interactive web applications straight from R.
2. knitR and animation.
Yihui Xie created a literate programming package for R, called knitR. knitR enables R code to be embedded in other documents of different file types. Both knitR and the animation package are the subject of a 2013 journal article by Xie.
The book ‘Dynamic Documents with R and knitr‘ is authored by Xie.
Another author used knitR and some other packages to create a package for an ‘iPython’-style R notebook using markdown to produce the HTML.
3. htmlwidgets.
This package enables the use of javascript libraries in an HTML document generated R/Markdown or from Shiny. Before this, it was necessary to work with R objects, and embed in script. But now the html package includes everything with one line of R code.
4. Leaflets and DataTables.
There is a discussion video at RStudio in which Xie illustrates the use of htmlwidgets in two further packages, Leaflet and DataTables.
5. Xaringan
The xaringan package (with its own self-explanatory xaringan “Presentation Ninja” slideshow) is another of Yihui Xiu’s excellent output. It is used to create browser-based slides, and relies on the remark.js package, which Xiu recommends you become familiar with before proceeding to use xaringan. Here’s a link to a recent slideshow by Dr Alison Hill explaining her use of xaringan.
Xaringan has leveraged the work of the remark.js library, which converts markdown into HTML files ready for displaying in a browser.
6. Slidex
Daniel Anderson has recently written a neat package called slidex that will convert pptx (powerpoint) slides into HTML-ready powerpoint slides, by extracting the content and then using R’s xaringan/remark.js to complete the build of the slideshow ready for a browser.
