[R] R on webserver with browser-gui

[idontwant googeltospyafterme]

hi everyone,

i know r since last summer and i love it. i'm studying economics and
use it for econometrical tasks at university. besides that in a
private project a buddy of mine and me do some economic evaluation
with data stored in a MYSQL-database. we export the values from our
online MYSQL database to analyse them offline with r. the results then
also hav to be stored in the mysql.

so far so good. but now we would like to do some process-optimization.
we want to run r directly on the webserver, so that it can fetch the
data itself from the MYSQL and save it into a temp-folder for
analysing. this should work automatically, after we selected the
appropriate r-script in a browser-gui for R.

until know after collecting some information, i think the best
approach to reach that goal is:
* using mod_R / RApache to run multiple instances of r on the server,
* build a website that will serve as frontend/gui for r either with
html/php or some ajax-framework,
* connect R to the database with one of the available db-packages to
fetch the survey-data
* put the r-scripts for analysis somewhere on the server
* use cairo for generation of the images
* and see what happens...

i would like to know, if my construction seems good to you, if you
have other recommendations or constructive critics and what you think
about the effort for configuring mod_R/RAPACHE, cairo and the
db-package for r.

thanks a lot in advance for your help!

cheers,

josuah r.