New Zealand Statistical Association 2024 Conference

Tom Elliott

iNZight Analytics Ltd

Introducing rserve-ts: a modernised library for R-to-web communication

Web front-ends are becoming increasingly popular for building applications due to their ability to deploy seamlessly across both desktop and mobile devices, and a wide range of tools, libraries and frameworks exist that allow developers to create all kinds of applications – RStudio, for example.

‘Rserve’ is an R library providing two-way communication between R and other environments – on the web, this means Javascript. However, the ‘rserve-js’ library has become outdated and no longer fits neatly into modern web development ecosystems, making it a difficult pitch to encourage uptake and wider usage.

I have been working on a new ecosystem for integrating R into modern web applications that builds on Rserve by adding in TypeScript support and other modern patterns. This talk introduces some of my early work updating the ‘rserve-js’ library, demonstrated with a simple React application.