I just returned from the useR! 2012 conference for developers and users of R. One of the common themes to many of the presentations was integration of R-based statistical systems with other systems, be they other programming languages, web systems, or enterprise data systems. Some highlights for me were an update to Rserve that includes 1-stop web services, and a presentation on ESB integration. Although I didn’t see it discussed, the new httr package for easier access to web services is also another outstanding development in integrating R into large-scale systems.

Coincidentally, I just a week or so ago had given a short presentation to the local R Meetup entitled “Annotating Enterprise Data from an R Server.” The topic for the evening was “R in the Enterprise,” and others talked about generating large, automated reports with knitr, and using RPy2 to integrate R into a Python-based web system. I talked about my experiences building and deploying a predictive system, using the corporate database as the common link. Here are the slides: