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Comment by hadley | Hacker News Reader

A lighterweight alternative to renv is to use Posit Public Package Manage (https://packagemanager.posit.co/) with a pinned date. That doesn't help if you're installing packages from a mix of places, but if you're only using CRAN packages it lets you get everything as of a fixed date.

And of course on the web side you have shiny (https://shiny.posit.co), which now also comes in a python flavour.

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shiny is nice for one-off data dashboards and single-purpose mini-apps. I see the python equivalents are like dash/plotly. Shiny is not a full fledged web framework, and isn't a viable replacement for e.g. Django.

Aside -- we tried using dash in our production app and then had to remove it after a month, because these types of frameworks that spit out front-end code are almost never flexible enough to do what you actually need to do in a full app context, and you end up doing more work to fight the framework versus the time-savings from the initial prototype.

I'd highly encourage you to look into shiny more. No, it's not django, but it's a much richer framework than dash, and you can always bring your own HTML if what it generates for you isn't sufficient.

I'm not arguing that dash is better than shiny -- I think shiny is probably better!

But the fact that there's no Django for R means shiny's a dead-end for a production web app.

> there's no django for R

ambiorix might be what you're looking for.

check it out: https://ambiorix.dev/

it provides: - routing - api generation - templating - web sockets

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