What is teal?

teal is an R framework designed to streamline the development of interactive data analysis applications. Built on top of Shiny, teal provides a modular, standardized approach to creating data exploration and visualization tools.

teal ecosystem

teal is just one R package from a teal ecosystem. Other packages that we will be using during these workshops that come from teal are: * teal.modules.clinical * teal.modules.general

There are multiple other packages that are developed alongside teal. You can find a comprehensive list at http://github.com/insightsengineering.

Key characteristics of teal

  • Modular Architecture: Build applications using reusable, interchangeable components
  • Reproducible Analytics: Maintain complete analysis reproducibility with built-in code tracking
  • User-Friendly Interface: Intuitive design accessible to both developers and end-users
  • Clinical Focus: Specialized modules for pharmaceutical and clinical trial data analysis
  • Interactive Exploration: Real-time data filtering, visualization, and analysis capabilities

How teal fits with shiny

teal is built on top of Shiny, extending Shiny’s capabilities specifically for data analysis applications:

  • Modular framework: While Shiny provides the reactive infrastructure, teal adds a standardized, modular architecture for data analysis modules.
  • Reproducibility layer: teal adds automatic code tracking and reproducibility features that go beyond standard Shiny applications.
  • Clinical data handling: teal provides specialized data structures and workflows for clinical trial data (CDISC/ADaM) that aren’t available in base Shiny.
  • Integrated filtering: teal includes a sophisticated filter panel system that works seamlessly across all modules, which would require significant custom development in pure Shiny.

In essence, teal takes Shiny’s reactive web application framework and adds the specialized tools, patterns, and infrastructure needed for reproducible, clinical-grade data analysis applications.