Architecture
About R
R is an open source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics that provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.
One of R’s strengths is the ease with which well-designed visualizations and publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. The Data INCITE program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institue uses R as the basis for several courses, including Intro to Data Math, Data Analytics Research Lab and Health Analytics Challenge Lab; R also is the data analytics core of many research projects at Rensselaer.
R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux), Windows and MacOS. For more information about R, refer to the R Project website.
StudySafe was developed using R version 3.6.0 (2019-04-26), running on CentOS 7.
About R Shiny
Shiny is an open source R package that provides an elegant and powerful web framework for building web applications using R. Shiny is a framework for turning analyses into interactive web applications without requiring extensive HTML, CSS, or JavaScript knowledge. Shiny does allow Shiny app developers to extend apps with CSS themes, htmlwidgets, and JavaScript actions, capabilities that the StudySafe team took full advantage of.
StudySafe was deployed using R Shiny Server () on a CentOS 7 virtual server at https://studysafe.idea.rpi.edu/.