README.md

RWebServer

RWebServer is a new R Package to easily create a web server based on R.

There already exists similar packages. Currently, the most discussed is Shiny: it permits to build easily small web applications by simply writing some R code.

A shiny application consists in two R scripts: one script creates a html interface, the other script define the server side of the application. The power of shiny is its simplicity : every R user can create a cool interactive web application without learning html, css and javascript. The cost of this is a lack of flexibility : you can only build small applications and the client side has to be generated with Shiny.

There exists some alternatives : Rook, Rapache and FastRweb. But all are either difficult to install and configure, either hard to use (or both !). The aim of RWebServer is to provide a simple to create a web server based on R, and to easily start and stop it.

Installation

Use the library devtools to install from github :

library(devtools)
install_github("RWebServer", "cuche27")

Quick start

library(RWebServer)
webServer.skeleton()
startWebServer("myRWebServer")

In your web browser, go to http://localhost:8080. Wow !

For now, your server does not do anything interesting. create a R script called "hello.R" and save it in the folder "myRWebServer/R". Put the following code :

run <- function(name="world", punct="!", ...) {
  paste("Hello", name, punct)
}

In your browser, check the following urls :

http://localhost:8080/hello

http://localhost:8080/hello?name=universe

http://localhost:8080/hello?name=universe&punct=!!!

Got it ? When you call a url like http://myserver:8080/scriptname?param1=val1&param2=val2, your server sources the script scriptname.R in the R folder and execute the function run with arguments param1="val1" and param2="val2"