Department of Biostatistics Seminar/Workshop Series

Rack: A Web Server Interface for R

Jeff Horner, BS

Computer Systems Analyst III, Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

Wednesday, March 23, 1:30-2:30pm, MRBIII Conference Room 1220

The rApache project provides a complete R web application development and deployment environment, however it can be difficult to develop such an application in a server environment. The upcoming release of R 2.13 will provide basic functionality for developing R web applications on the desktop via the internal HTTP server (Rhttpd). Unfortunately rApache and Rhttpd differ in their programming interface. Enter Rack, a web server interface for R. In a nutshell, R users write their web applications using the Rack interface specification, and web servers conform their interface to Rack. We have written an R package (named Rack) that provides the interface spec and implementation for rApache and Rhttpd. With rack, it is feasible that R users can develop web applications on their own desktop R instances and then deploy to a faster, more scalable web server environment.

Presentation given at the NY R Meetup on Tuesday, March 15