I have to use htmlwidgets related packages(plotly and dygraphs) to generate plots which I can then either: 1. save as .html file and link them through an iframe. 2. use in a shiny app.
I would prefer creating my own UI instead of using Shiny, but:
If I don't use Shiny, every time I regenerate the plot(on some kind of user-interaction), the html file created by plotly/dygraphs (which is more than 1MB) needs to be transferred to the client. This might create a bottleneck.
Thus I would like to know if using Shiny would decrease the amount of data that needsto be transferred to client when re-rendering the plot on user-interaction.
If you are looking to create you're own UI, but still want R on the 'back-end', you should have a look at the openCPU project, which always you to define REST APIs backed by R functions that can be called from any web framework.