Deploying applications via Docker container is the current talk of town. I have heard about Docker and played around with it a little, but when Dirk Eddelbuettel posted his R and Docker talk last Friday I got really excited and had to have a go myself.
My aim was to rent some resources in the cloud, pull an RStudio Server container and run RStudio in a browser. It was actually surprisingly simple to get started.
In many cases Word is still the preferred file format for collaboration in the office. Yet, it is often a challenge to work with it, not so much because of the software, but how it is used and abused. Thanks to Markdown it is no longer painful to include mathematical notations and R output into Word. I have been using R Markdown for a while now and have grown very fond of it.
In my previous post, I presented a preview version of googleVis that provided an integration with RStudio’s Viewer pane (introduced with version 0.98.441).
Over 80% in my little survey favoured the new default output mechanism of googleVis within RStudio. Hence, I uploaded googleVis 0.4.7 on CRAN over the weekend.
However, there were also some thoughtful comments, which suggested that the RStudio Viewer pane is not always the best option. Indeed, Flash charts and gvisMerge output will still be displayed in your default browser, but also if you work on larger charts and with smaller screen, then the browser might still be the better option compared to the Viewer pane - of course you can launch the browser from the Viewer pane as well.
The preview version 0.98.441 of RStudio introduced a new viewer pane to render local web content and with that it allows me to display googleVis charts within RStudio rather than in a separate browser window.
I think this is a rather nice feature and hence I have updated the plot method in googleVis to use the RStudio viewer pane as the default output. If you use another editor, or if the plot is using one of the Flash based charts, then the browser is still the default display.
The guys at RStudio have done a fantastic job with shiny. It is really easy to build web apps with R using shiny. With the help of Joe Cheng from RStudio we figured out a way to make googleVis work on shiny as well. This allows you to make use of the Google Charts Tools in your shiny app directly from R. What I present here are three initial examples which seem to work in most browsers.
After last week’s kerfuffle I hope the roll out of googleVis version 0.3.2 will be smooth. To test the water I release this version into the wild here and if it doesn’t get shot down in the next days, then I shall try to upload it to CRAN. I am mindful of the CRAN policy, so please get in touch or add comments below if you find any show stoppers.
Tonight I will give a talk at the Cambridge R user group about googleVis. Following my good experience with knitr and RStudio to create interactive reports, I thought that I should try to create the slides in the same way as well.
Christopher Gandrud’s recent post reminded me of deck.js, a JavaScript library for interactive html slides, which I have used in the past, but as Christopher experienced, it is currently not that straightforward to use with R and knitr.
Last Saturday I met the guys from RStudio at the R in Finance conference in Chicago. I was curious to find out what RStudio could offer. In the past I have used mostly Emacs + ESS for editing R files. Well, and what a surprise it was. JJ, Joe and Josh showed me a preview of version 0.96 of their software, which adds a close integration of Sweave and knitr to RStudio, helping to create dynamic web reports with the new R Markdown and R HTML formats more easily.