Can R be meaningfully run against datasets small enough to fit in the browser?
WebR – R in the Browser
11–20 of 30 posts
Re: WebR – R in the Browser
#12This is an awesome project. We recently used it to build a statically hosted EC2 instance comparison website, using this for plotting (ggplot2) and DuckDB-Wasm for querying the instance data. Only the first page load is slow b/c of all the wasm and R packages, but it's fast for interactive querying and plotting and was really easy to create.
If the URL is public, it would be neat to see if you want to share it.
Sure! https://cloudspecs.fyi/ (feedback welcome!)
Since it's now accepted, I guess I can also share the accompanying paper [1] about cloud hardware evolution; the idea is that every plot in the paper is clickable and opens an interactive version of itself. WebR was perfect for this use case.
https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/clouds...
Re: WebR – R in the Browser
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the URL is public, it would be neat to see if you want to share it.
Sure! https://cloudspecs.fyi/ (feedback welcome!) Since it's now accepted, I guess I can also share the accompanying paper [1] about cloud hardware evolution; the idea is that every plot in the paper is clickable and opens an interactive version of itself. WebR was perfect for this use case. https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/clouds...
I love this, thanks for sharing! Linking to interactive versions of figures is such a great idea and use of WASM.
Re: WebR – R in the Browser
#14I use R a lot but I still prefer Javascript libraries for interactivity. Javascript libraries feels lot more smoother than something like webR. Having said that, it is impressive that R is able to transcend in the interactivity with just internet browser.
Re: WebR – R in the Browser
#15Impressive how nice this looks, and I am also impressed by how quickly it runs. I don't know who did this (could not find any "about" info), but kudos on a job well done. However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running i…
> Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.
The site is running completely locally. You can disable your network in devtools and it will continue to work.
Re: WebR – R in the Browser
#16Impressive how nice this looks, and I am also impressed by how quickly it runs. I don't know who did this (could not find any "about" info), but kudos on a job well done. However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running i…
> I don't know who did this
I believe it's George Stagg https://github.com/georgestagg
Re: WebR – R in the Browser
#17Would be interesting to see if we can run shiny entirely client side with this.
Yes, it makes it possible to run Shiny without a Shiny server. There are a few limitations but it works well.
Re: WebR – R in the Browser
#18there should be another "browser" with better observability features. wasm is turning browsers into a hypervisor for virtual machines that run containers for a variety of languages now, including R.
great that these products are finding a way, but there seems to be an opportunity to do this right.
Re: WebR – R in the Browser
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the URL is public, it would be neat to see if you want to share it.
Sure! https://cloudspecs.fyi/ (feedback welcome!) Since it's now accepted, I guess I can also share the accompanying paper [1] about cloud hardware evolution; the idea is that every plot in the paper is clickable and opens an interactive version of itself. WebR was perfect for this use case. https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/clouds...
(Disclosure: I work on https://quarto.org, for the same company that the author of WebR works on) Thanks for sharing that PDF link. It's so good! Would you be willing to write a bit about how you produced that PDF? It's a great example of what places like CIDR should be encouraging in terms of academic publications.
Re: WebR – R in the Browser
#20Cool! Emscripten-forge also recently got a R distribution that runs natively on the browser: https://blog.jupyter.org/r-in-the-browser-announcing-our-web...