Combining the power of R and D3.js • Hacker News Board

Re: Combining the power of R and D3.js

#11

Post by minimaxir » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 3:09 PM UTC

Since the post linked to my ggplot2 tutorial, I should probably mention that I'm really not a fan of interactive charts/D3 for static content, because a) loading the data can dramatically increase the loading time of the webpage and b) interactive charts will break on mobile devices, so you need to invest time to QA that.

Rstudio now offers HTMLWidgets which allow for interactive chart generation natively, which is interesting: http://blog.rstudio.org/2014/12/18/htmlwidgets-javascript-da...

Re: Combining the power of R and D3.js

#12

Post by baldfat » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 3:36 PM UTC

IndianAstronaut wrote: post #7

I wonder how this will compare to ggvis when it becomes more advanced. Also, I recommend looking intk Shiny for interactivity.

I have been using ggvis for a little while. It is very flexible in terms of changing variables for exploratory use. (My favorite personal use). I haven't done much with Shiny yet but I think D3 is more in lines with RStudio's html widgets. http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/developer_html_widgets.html

Re: Combining the power of R and D3.js

#13

Post by currywurst » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 4:12 PM UTC

The culmination of such an approach is realized in the Beaker Notebook (http://www.beakernotebook.com). You can not only switch between languages, but the environment allows you to share datasets between Groovy, Python, JS, Julia, Ruby etc ..

It's a work in progress, but something to watch out for, imho

Re: Combining the power of R and D3.js

#14

Post by sinwave » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

There is a seemingly dead github repo called "R2D3" by hadley wickham. Wonder what came of that project?

https://github.com/hadley/r2d3

Re: Combining the power of R and D3.js

#15

Post by ayy88 » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

couchand wrote: post #4

R is a very powerful tool, but I fail to see how it's adding value in this case. It seems like the author is advocating just using R to clean up the data and put it in JSON. The same can be done (without overhead for context switching and server-client architecture) in JS itself. Tools like Crossfilter [0] can be seamlessly integrated with D3. [0]: https://square.github.io/crossfilter/

I think the strongest use case for interfacing R with JS (be it through plot.ly, Shiny, rCharts etc) is when there is more serious statistical modelling going on (i.e. plotting things like credible intervals or model coefficients). But often you find that you add a 'statistical layer' after you already have an existing plot (i.e. adding a confidence band to a line plot). Maybe it makes sense to have one tool that handles all these cases.

Re: Combining the power of R and D3.js

#16

Post by baldfat » Wed, Mar 11, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

currywurst wrote: post #13

The culmination of such an approach is realized in the Beaker Notebook ( http://www.beakernotebook.com ). You can not only switch between languages, but the environment allows you to share datasets between Groovy, Python, JS, Julia, Ruby etc .. It's a work in progress, but something to watch out for, imho

Well this is what iPython is morphing into. iPython is going kernel agnostic and you can actually use dozens of languages already. Juypter is the new name.