(This article was first published on What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)
I’m looking at ways to provide access to R via a web application. First rule: see what’s available first, before you reinvent the wheel. It’s not pretty.
From the R Web Interfaces FAQ:
| Software | Brief notes |
|---|---|
| Rweb | Page last updated 1999. Of the 3 example links on the page one ran very slowly, the second not at all and the third is broken. |
| R-Online | Or rather, not online. Unless this CGI form is the same thing. I tried Example 1, it returned a server error. |
| Rcgi | Links to several CGI forms, none of which worked for me. |
| CGI-based R access | Link did not load. |
| CGIwithR | Package now maintained at Omegahat. Did not attempt installation. Last updated 2005. |
| Rpad | I could not connect to this URL. |
| RApache | The pick of the bunch. Provides server-side access to R through an Apache module. I was able to install RApache on 32-bit (but not 64-bit) Ubuntu 9.10 and get it running. Could use more documentation. |
| Rserve | Serves R via TCP/IP. Last updated 2006. |
| OpenStatServer | Broken link. No longer exists, so far as I can tell. |
| R PHP Online | Link out of date (but you can follow it to the newer page). Last updated 2003, so unlikely to be much use. |
| R-php | Last updated 2006; the example that I tried gave a server error. |
| webbioc | A Bioconductor package. Did not investigate further. |
| Rwui | An application to create R web interfaces. My browser hung at “waiting for cache”. I gave up. |
So, aside from RApache and some very old-fashioned and/or broken CGI scripts, I conclude that there is little interest in writing beautiful, modern statistical web applications (notable exception). Not so much a case of “reinventing” as “inventing”.
Posted in computing, R, research diary, statistics, web resources
To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on his blog: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate » R.
R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials on topics such as: visualization (ggplot2, Boxplots, maps, animation), programming (RStudio, Sweave, LaTeX, SQL, Eclipse, git, hadoop, Web Scraping) statistics (regression, PCA, time series,ecdf, trading) and more...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).