Ulka, I have not heard of anyone taking Duncan Long's work
Embedding R in Postgres
and actually using it in a Production setting. But if you have, I'd
be very interested! Please let us know what you find out...
You may want to ask if anyone has picked up Long's work on the
R database special interest group
mailing list. The list has almost no traffic, but some very
high-powered R people (e.g.,
Brian D. Ripley)
do subscribe and respond.
Also, back in
October 2001,
Roberto and Don pointed out that Long was probably mistaken in
believing that R needs to be thread safe when embedded inside Postgres
- it doesn't.
On the other hand, if you instead wanted to embed R inside AOLserver,
like others have done for
Python,
Java,
Standard ML, and
Perl,
then it would need to be thread-safe.
If you can get R working reliably (perhaps it does already - I don't
know) in either Postgres or AOLserver, or both, then you'll be able to
use it nicely in an OpenACS environment. Once you do that, there's
nothing particularly special about OpenACS that would either prevent
or help you from using R however you want.
If your needs are simpler, you can always simply spawn R processes
from Tcl (or perhaps even as CGI scripts). I haven't tried that with
R (yet), but I've seen it done with S-Plus. S-Plus makes this
slightly annoying because you have to do a bunch of setting of
environemnt variables and stuff to play nice with S-Plus's
"workspaces", but it's definitely practical if you just need to run
some S calculations from Tcl.
By the way, Ulka, what sort of uses to you expect to put R to in your
OpenACS environment? I'm curious...
