I'd like to access data in my R session from elsewhere via HTTP. My
particular use case would be R on Linux, accessing data from Windows,
all on the same intranet.
Naively, when I say this, I imagine something like:
> theData <- big.calculation.returning.data.frame()
> startHttpServer(port=8675)
(blocks until I C-c it)
Elsewhere...
http://linuxmachine:8675/htmlDF?theData
-> HTML table version of data frame
or
http://linuxmachine:8675/csvDF?theData
-> CSV export of data frame
Then I C-c my server and continue working in R.
Rserve has its own protocol, plus it spawns extra processes. biocep
looks interesting, but it's far more ambitious than this, and I can't
tell if it would actually work in this case. svSocket looks
interesting, but (if I understand it correctly) it would be a lot of
work to implement HTTP over its raw sockets.
Basically, I have a few tools (including Excel) that know how to get
data from web services, but no way to export data from R in a way that
they can see. I'm spoiled a little by having used q (from kx.com),
which embeds a HTTP server in the interpreter and makes this kind of
access very easy; I'd like to have the same thing in R.
Thanks,
- Johann