Ran across a technical report I wrote in April 2009 regarding my work linking REDCap with rApache. Here’s the introductory text and a link to the original report (note that way back then I was calling it Rapache – now it’s rApache – don’t ask):

“R is fast becoming the language of choice for statistical computing, and researchers are quickly transferring their cutting edge research to R’s Comprehensive Package Network (CRAN http://cran.r-project.org/). To take advantage of this, software architects must decide how they can leverage this research in an effective and manageable way, both for their existing software systems and their future software systems. Leveraging R ranges from having researchers run statistical models with R on their desktop against data extracted from data warehouses to integrating R as a component in a larger software system. Further, software components can be tightly or loosely coupled. Dynamically linking a library of linear algebra functions to a C program can be thought of as tight coupling, while a client program exchanging messages with a server program can be thought of as loose coupling.”

http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/RapacheWebServicesReport