R in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Other Ways to Run R

There are several open-source projects that allow you to combine R with other applications:

As a web application

The rApache software allows you to incorporate analyses from R into a web application. (For example, you might want to build a server that shows sophisticated reports using R lattice graphics.) For information about this project, see http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/rapache/.

As a server

The Rserve software allows you to access R from within other applications. For example, you can produce a Java program that uses R to perform some calculations. As the name implies, Rserve is implemented as a network server, so a single Rserve instance can handle calculations from multiple users on different machines. One way to use Rserve is to install it on a heavy-duty server with lots of CPU power and memory, so that users can perform calculations that they couldn’t easily perform on their own desktops. For more about this project, see http://www.rforge.net/Rserve/index.html.

As we described above, you can also use R Studio to run R on a server and access if from a web browser.

Inside Emacs

The ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) package is an add-on for Emacs that allows you to run R directly within Emacs. For more on this project, see http://ess.r-project.org/.