Blog

Wildlife management

August 26, 2025

Introduction Open Analytics often receives requests to visualize and summarize data from multiple data sources in a user-friendly way. Most of these projects result in in-house applications, while projects for governmental institutions typically result in publicly available web applications. A nice example is faunabeheer.inbo.be, developed for the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) and the Agency for Nature and Forests (ANB) responding to questions from (local) authorities, land managers, hunters, researchers, journalists, citizens and farmers.

Affordable Shiny app hosting for 500 concurrent users

August 19, 2025

Cloud providers are no longer just offering traditional x86-based servers, ARM-based servers are now becoming a serious alternative. And for good reason: they’re often far more cost-effective and power-efficient than their x86 counterparts. For instance, we found a provider offering a server with 16 virtual cores and 32 GB of RAM for just €30 per month. To be realistic, most providers charge between €100 and €200 per month for such a server.

ShinyProxy 3.2.0

July 8, 2025

We’re happy to share that ShinyProxy 3.2.0 is now available. This release focuses on a range of small but meaningful improvements aimed at making ShinyProxy easier to use. Debugging issues is now easier than ever, thanks to clearer error messages and improved error handling. The documentation has been extended with more background information (allowing you to better understand how ShinyProxy works) and additional troubleshooting information. During the last months, we’ve noticed that the adoption of ShinyProxy has been rapidly growing.

Hash-tag baby

July 3, 2025

Introduction Naming a baby can be a difficult task. It can take - soon to be - parents quite some time to align on a name they both like. Afterwards it can also be challenging to keep the name a secret until birth. If you are lucky, there might be some close friends or colleagues who are simultaneously expecting a child. It can be an unique occasion where you can share experiences.

checkglobals: an(other) R-package for static code analysis

March 25, 2025

Introduction An important aspect of writing an R-script or an R-package is ensuring reproducibility and maintainability of the developed code, not only for others, but also for our future selves. The modern R ecosystem provides various tools and packages to help organize and validate written R code. Some widely used packages include roxygen2 (for function documentation), renv (for dependency management and environment isolation), and testthat, tinytest and Runit for unit testing[1].

Getting started with Crane

March 4, 2025

As the Common Crane (Grus grus) is migrating back to their breeding area, it’s time to set up your own Crane server. Crane is a new open source product to host data science artifacts: data analysis reports, documentation sites, packages and libraries, you can read the introduction blog post here. This post provides a simple setup to get started with Crane using Docker Compose. First of all, make sure to install Docker and Docker compose.

Crane 1.0.0 released!

February 4, 2025

Publishing is an integral part of the data analysis process. Whether it’s in the form of code, reports or technical documentation, at some point artifacts need to be shared. More often than not, such artifacts are confidential and their access needs to be properly secured. There exist solutions for at least some types of artifacts, but we needed one simple tool that could help us with all the use cases we encounter in our daily practice, built with modern technology and security standards.

tinytest2JUnit: report your tinytest results in the CI

June 20, 2024

tinytest2JUnit: report your tinytest results in the CI Introduction “Lightweight is the right weight” is the motto of packages adhering to the tinyverse principle. One of the packages following this principle is the tinytest package, a zero-dependency unit testing framework. It is a nice alternative to the heavy-weight testthat testing framework, which (at the time of writing and including its recursive dependencies) has a dependency footprint of 30 packages!

ShinyProxy 3.1.0

May 7, 2024

ShinyProxy 3.1.0 Last year we released a major update of ShinyProxy, bringing High Availability, Scaling, App parameters, improved integration with Kubernetes and much more. Today’s release goes even further, bringing Pre-Initialization, Container sharing and even a new container backend. Along with these major features, the release is packed with numerous small improvements. ShinyProxy is a novel, open source platform to deploy Shiny apps for the enterprise or larger organizations. Nevertheless, ShinyProxy is also an excellent choice for deploying a handful of apps in smaller organizations.

ShinyProxy 3.0.0

March 2, 2023

ShinyProxy 3.0.0 Today we release version 3.0.0 of ShinyProxy, providing improvements on all aspects of using and deploying ShinyProxy. ShinyProxy is a novel, open source platform to deploy Shiny apps for the enterprise or larger organizations. Nevertheless, ShinyProxy is also an excellent choice for deploying a handful of apps in smaller organizations. While ShinyProxy is generally used to host Shiny applications, it has always been designed with the idea to host any application that can be packaged into a Docker container.