[Rd] How to execute R scripts simultaneously from multiple threads

[Erik van Zijst]

Hi Martin,

Your approach of bolting a webservices layer on top of R is a really
nice (and quite natural) thing to do.

I appreciate your early announcement in response to our thread and I'd
very much like to be kept in the loop of future announcements, so please
add my address to your list.

As you already suggested, webservices are fairly expensive with their
HTTP and XML-parsing, making it less suitable for many small
invocations. However, it makes an ideal fit in most other environments.
Webservices adoption has come a long way, so I expect it to easily find
its way into the enterprise (is it GPL-licensed?).

cheers,
Erik


Martin Morgan wrote:
> Vladimir, Jeff, et al.,
> 
> This is more pre-publicity than immediately available solution, but
> we've been working on the 'RWebServices' project. The R evaluator and
> user functions get wrapped in Java, and the Java exposed as web
> service. We use ActiveMQ to broker transactions between the front-end
> web service and persistent back-end R workers. The workers rely on
> SJava to wrap and evaluate R.
> 
> Some of the features and opportunities of this system are: strongly
> typed functions in R (using the TypeInfo package); native R-Java
> translation (using SJava and our own converters); programmatic
> interface (i.e., as web services; this benefits from use of S4 as a
> formal class system); scalable computation (through addition of more /
> specialized workers in ActiveMQ); and access to Java-based tools
> available for web service deployment. Creating web services can be
> nearly automatic, once the R functions are appropriately typed. Mostly
> our focus has been on big-data computation, which might be orthogonal
> to the needs of the original post.
> 
> We will provide more information at the Directions in Statistical
> Computing conference in mid-February, so please drop me a line if
> you'd like to be kept up-to-date.
> 
> Martin

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