R in Oracle Java Cloud and Existing R – Java Integration #rstats

So I finally got my test plan accepted for a 1 month trial to the Oracle Public Cloud at https://cloud.oracle.com/ .

I am testing this for my next book R for Cloud Computing ( I have already covered Windows Azure, Amazon AWS, and in the middle of testing Google Compute).

Some initial thoughts- this Java cloud seemed more suitable for web apps, than for data science ( but I have to spend much more time on this).

I really liked the help and documentation and tutorials, Oracle has invested a lot in it to make it friendly to enterprise users.

Hopefully the Oracle R Enterprise ORE guys can talk to the Oracle Cloud department and get some common use case projects going.

In the meantime, I did a roundup on all R -Java projects.

They include-

rJava by Simon Urbanek-http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rJava/index.html

Low-level interface to Java VM very much like .C/.Call and friends. Allows creation of objects, calling methods and accessing fields.

JRI – http://www.rforge.net/JRI/

JRI is a Java/R Interface, which allows to run R inside Java applications as a single thread. Basically it loads R dynamic library into Java and provides a Java API to R functionality. It supports both simple calls to R functions and a full running REPL.

In a sense JRI is the inverse of rJava and both can be combined (i.e. you can run R code inside JRI that calls back to the JVM via rJava). The JGR project makes the full use of both JRI and rJava to provide a full Java GUI for R.

Important: JRI is now part of rJava, so if you simply want to use JRI, install rJava binary and your’e all set! There will be no further stand-alone JRI releases, JRI is now released only as a part of rJava

RJava eclipse Plugin –http://www.studytrails.com/RJava-Eclipse-Plugin/

Rengin by Alexander Bertram-http://code.google.com/p/renjin/

Renjin is a new JVM-based interpreter for the R language. It is intended to be 100% compatible with the original interpreter, to run on the Google AppEngine platform, and generally to open new opportunities for embedding libraries and programs written in R.

Download the lastest build – Try the interpreter online

Rsession http://code.google.com/p/rsession/ R sessions wrapping for Java

Rsession provides an easy to use java class giving access to remote or local R session. The back-end engine is Rserve 0.6, locally spawned automatically if necessary.

Rsession differs from Rserve as it is a higher level API, and it includes server side startup of Rserve. Therefore, it is easier to use in some point of vue, as it provides a multi session R engine (including for Windows, thanks to an ugly turn-around).

RCaller –http://code.google.com/p/rcaller/

A library for calling R from Java. Also see http://stdioe.blogspot.in/search/label/rcaller

RCaller 2.0 uses the package Runiversal which has two functions for converting R list objects to Java or XML. The new logic underlying the RCaller is to translate java arrays to R, send them and the commands to R interpreter and handle the results as XML documents. XML documents then parsed using Java’s standard XML DOM document API’s. Finally, user can handle the results from Java.

RServe –http://www.rforge.net/Rserve/

Rserve is a TCP/IP server which allows other programs to use facilities of R (see www.r-project.org) from various languages without the need to initialize R or link against R library. Every connection has a separate workspace and working directory. Client-side implementations are available for popular languages such as C/C++, PHP and Java.

The following Java code illustrates the easy integration of Rserve:

RConnection c = new RConnection(); double d[] = c.eval("rnorm(10)").asDoubles();

JGR –http://www.rforge.net/JGR/

What is JGR?
	JGR (speak ‘Jaguar’) is a universal and unified Graphical User Interface for R (it actually abbreviates Java Gui for R). JGR was introduced at the useR! meeting in 2004 and there is an introductory article in the Statistical Computing and Graphics Newsletter