(R-FAQ.info)R Web Interfaces

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4 R Web Interfaces
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*Rweb* is developed and maintained by Jeff Banfield
<jeff@math.montana.edu>.  The Rweb Home Page
(https://rweb.stat.umn.edu/Rweb/) provides access to all three versions
of Rweb--a simple text entry form that returns output and graphs, a more
sophisticated JavaScript version that provides a multiple window
environment, and a set of point and click modules that are useful for
introductory statistics courses and require no knowledge of the R
language.  All of the Rweb versions can analyze Web accessible datasets
if a URL is provided.

   The paper "Rweb: Web-based Statistical Analysis", providing a
detailed explanation of the different versions of Rweb and an overview
of how Rweb works, was published in the Journal of Statistical Software
(<http://www.jstatsoft.org/v04/i01/>).

   *Rcgi* is a CGI WWW interface to R by MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com>.  It
had the ability to use "embedded code": you could mix user input and
code, allowing the HTML author to do anything from load in data sets to
enter most of the commands for users without writing CGI scripts.
Graphical output was possible in PostScript or GIF formats and the
executed code was presented to the user for revision.  However, it is
not clear if the project is still active.

   There are many additional examples of web interfaces to R which
basically allow to submit R code to a remote server, see for example the
collection of links available from
<http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/StatCompCourse>.

   David Firth (http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/dfirth) has written
*CGIwithR* (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=CGIwithR), an R add-on
package available from CRAN.  It provides some simple extensions to R to
facilitate running R scripts through the CGI interface to a web server,
and allows submission of data using both GET and POST methods.  It is
easily installed using Apache under Linux and in principle should run on
any platform that supports R and a web server provided that the
installer has the necessary security permissions.  David's paper
"CGIwithR: Facilities for Processing Web Forms Using R" was published in
the Journal of Statistical Software
(<http://www.jstatsoft.org/v08/i10/>).  The package is now maintained by
Duncan Temple Lang <duncan@wald.ucdavis.edu>.  and has a web page at
<http://www.omegahat.net/CGIwithR/>.

   Jeff Horner is working on the R/Apache Integration Project which
embeds the R interpreter inside Apache 2 (and beyond).  A tutorial and
presentation are available from the project web page at
<http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/RApacheProject>.

   Rserve (https://www.rforge.net/Rserve/) is a project actively
developed by Simon Urbanek.  It implements a TCP/IP server which allows
other programs to use facilities of R. Clients are available from the
web site for Java and C++ (and could be written for other languages that
support TCP/IP sockets).

   Two projects use PHP to provide a web interface to R. R_PHP_Online
(http://steve-chen.net/R_PHP/) by Steve Chen (though it is unclear if
this project is still active) is somewhat similar to the above Rcgi and
Rweb.  R-php (http://dssm.unipa.it/R-php/?cmd=home) is actively
developed by Alfredo Pontillo and Angelo Mineo and provides both a web
interface to R and a set of pre-specified analyses that need no R code
input.

   webbioc (https://www.bioconductor.org/) is "an integrated web
interface for doing microarray analysis using several of the
Bioconductor packages" and is designed to be installed at local sites as
a shared computing resource.

   Rwui (http://sysbio.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/Rwui) is a web application to
create user-friendly web interfaces for R scripts.  All code for the web
interface is created automatically.  There is no need for the user to do
any extra scripting or learn any new scripting techniques.

   The *R.rsp* (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=R.rsp) package by
Henrik Bengtsson introduces "R Server Pages".  Analogous to Java Server
Pages, an R server page is typically HTML with embedded R code that gets
evaluated when the page is requested.  The package includes an internal
cross-platform HTTP server implemented in Tcl, so provides a good
framework for including web-based user interfaces in packages.  The
approach is similar to the use of the *brew*
(https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=brew) package with Rapache
(http://rapache.net/) with the advantage of cross-platform support and
easy installation.

   The *Rook* (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=Rook) package by
Jeffrey Horner provides a web server interface borrowing heavily from
Ruby's Rack project.

   Finally, Concerto (http://code.google.com/p/concerto-platform/) is a
user friendly open-source Web Interface to R developed at the
Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University.  It was designed as an
online platform to design and run Computerized Adaptive Tests, but can
be also used as a general-purpose R Web Interface.  It allows R users
with no programming or web designing background to quickly develop
flexible and powerful online applications, websites, and psychometrics
tests.  To maximize its reliability, security, and performance, Concerto
relies on the popular and reliable open-source elements such as MySQL
server (exchange and storage of the data), Rstudio
(https://rstudio.org/) (R code designing and testing, file management),
CKEditor (HTML Layer design), and PHP.