Wolfgang, I am currently working on this very thing under Duncan Temple Lang. Or, to be more precise what you are describing is one piece of our overarching goal, which is to create a system in which R can be run from within a browser (currently FireFox) with bi-directional communication occurring between the javascript/svg/flash engines and R. This will allow us to, for example, build web pages which can contain both R code (which can be executed in-browser) and "live"graphics devices in the form of javascript/svg/flash canvases, as per your query. It will also, eg, allow for the building of rich, easily customizable GUIs for R through the (relatively painless though not easy to do well) process of designing interactive/multimedia web pages.
Duncan has done quite a bit of work of this nature in the past, even going so far as embedding R in the Netscape browser some 10 years ago (SNetscape<http://www.omegahat.org/SNetscape/>note this is quite outdated now). More recently, last summer he created a package (RFirefox, not currently available, see below) which embeds R within Firefox (3.5) but currently only allows for communication from javascript down into R (so R code can be evaluated and the results passed back up to the javascript engine), before handing the project off to me to work on under his supervision. Currently the installation/configuration is _very_ fragile/nonexistent, and as I said, only one direction of communication is possible. We are currently working on implementing communication with javascript (and eventually flash, though this is not a priority) objects/methods from within R. This will allow us to draw to draw directly to javascript canvases from within an R process, among many other useful (and not so useful) capabilities. We hope to have a usable alpha/proof-of-concept release with bi-directional communication between XUL/javascript and R and a mildly-robust installation procedure sometime within the next few weeks (3-6), with a paper, live examples, and a more complete/robust package to follow. Glad to see there is some interest :) Sincerely, Gabe Becker On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 8:30 AM, Wolfgang Huber <whu...@embl.de> wrote: > > Since now many browsers support (ECMA/Java-)scripted SVG, I am wondering > whether there are already any examples of inserting R code into SVG > documents (or a Javascript canvas?) either directly, or perhaps more likely > through a JavaScript layer, to dynamically generate graphics or make them > interactive? > > I am aware of the excellent packages gridSVG and SVGAnnotation, which > facilitate making R-generated SVG plots more interesting either at > construction time or by postprocessing; the above question is about > employing R at viewing time. > > Best wishes > > Wolfgang Huber > EMBL > http://www.embl.de/research/units/genome_biology/huber > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
