A public Shiny app to monitor air quality in Belgium

Context summary

This public service scientific institute had developed a shiny application to disseminate information on air quality. Over time, this application had become very large, and difficult to develop and maintain.
ThinkR was asked to transpose this tool into a shiny application developed with {golem} and respecting the standards of good development practices used at ThinkR (package development, use of modules, unit testing, etc.).

Our intervention

– Redesigning the app to use {golem}
– UX redesign
– Overhaul of business logic
– Use of modules, unit tests, documentation …
– Use of an internal package for the business part of the application
– Management of dependencies and their evolution via {renv}
– Creation of Docker images for application deployment

Result & added value

– An application for the general public on a public health topic
– An application respecting good development practices in R / {shiny}
– Easier to use, maintain and evolve
– Dockerization of the application in a container that can be deployed on a dedicated server
Feel free to visit the following links (in French) :
– Laurent Spanu slides presented at the rencontres R 2023 : https://github.com/Rencontres-R/Rencontres_R_2023/blob/main/Presentations/2_Jeudi/3b_Geospatial_I/1_rr2023_20230622_SPANU_ISSEP.pdf
– Recoding of its talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FRoG-LpwXM
– App : http://www.data.wallonair.be/

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