Question

I would like to provide the following service on a webpage:

• Running an R-script daily which collects publicly available data and does some calculations (I have developed the script already, it needs some additional libs!)
• Posting the updated graphical and numerical/textual output on the webpage

I don’t want to run my own computer all the time so a kind of a cloud solution should be employed (I guess?!?).

Do you have any ideas how to accomplish the above ideas?

Answer 1

You may have a look at FastRWeb – it serves R scripts as if they were web pages and supports graphics as well as regular output. It uses Rserve which makes it much faster than any solution that involves starting R (such as R or Rscript). It works on any webserver wither via CGI or PHP.

A script to generate a plot would look like:

run <- function(n=100, ...) {
   p <- WebPlot(800, 600)
   n <- as.integer(n)
   plot(rnorm(n), rnorm(n), col=2, pch=19)
   p
}

Other solution is RApache which embeds R directly into the apache webserver.

Edit: And also by Jeff there is now Rook that uses the embedded R HTTP server (thanks to Joshua for pointing that one out).

You mentioned running it daily – if you don’t need online analysis, you can simply generate html pages and png files with R and send them to your webserver – all in an automated script. There are many R package that facilitate HTML output – just search in the CRAN package list for HTML.