Well I totally botched my launch last week. Thankfully, my wife straightened me out: I decided to change the name of Rack to Rook so there won’t be any future confusion. And instead of rewriting all my posts last week, just read them again and every time you read “Rack”, think “Rook” (and then take a swig of your favorite beverage).

Here’s the email I just sent to the R-packages mailing list:

Dear  useRs,

Rook is a new package that does three things:

 - It provides a way to run R web applications on your desktop with the
 new internal R web server named Rhttpd. Please see the Rhttpd help page.

 - It provides a set of reference classes you can use to write you R
 web applications. The following help pages provide more information:
 Brewery, Builder, File, Middleware, Redirect, Request, Response, Static,
 URLMap, and Utils. Also see the example web applications located in
 'system("exampleApps",package="Rook")'.

 - It provides a specification for writing your R web applications to
 work on any web server that supports the Rook specification. Currently,
 only Rhttpd implements it, but rApache is close behind. See the Rook
 help page for more information.

You may not see the need for web applications written in R, but consider
using Rook to build a statistical engine that complements a front-end
web system, or consider creating elegant ggplot2 graphics on-demand from
a fresh data stream. Also, consider creating dynamic instructional content
for the classroom.

If you have other examples or ideas, please let me know.

--
Jeffrey Horner  (author of rApache and brew)

@eddelbuettel is going to love that I put the #rstats twitter hashtag in my title 😉