App development best practices

[icedoverfire]

Hi everyone,

I'm extremely new to developing shiny apps. If my supervisor wants me to add functionality to an existing app (interactive graphs), I'm assuming it's a better idea to prototype the new functionality in a NEW shiny app so as to not break my existing app. The question becomes how to merge them later. Is it a simple copy-paste kind of thing?

My current shiny app hosts a map and a data table viewer - it's not as performant as I would like because the map is a big shapefile. Thinking through this, it would probably be better to separate this new functionality into its own app, and then link it to the existing app? We have the apps hosted on shinyapps.io

Advice/suggestions welcome! Thanks!

[nirgrahamuk]

@icedoverfire

I'm assuming it's a better idea to prototype the new functionality in a NEW shiny app so as to not break my existing app.

Use git for version control. You then make development branches off from your main branch, they can be remerged at a later date.
For tutorials you can look at Let’s Git started | Happy Git and GitHub for the useR (happygitwithr.com)