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Sharing live R functions with OpenCPU

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OpenCPU is a new initiative from R user Jeroen Ooms to make innovations in statistics, visualization and data-science more widely applicable. Based on open-source principles, it's a web-based service that lets you upload data visualizations and analyses as R scripts, and allow others to run them on demand. For example, you can upload a script to visualize a company's stock performance, which can then be embedded as a live chart, like this:

That chart was generated on-demand by the OpenCPU R server, and should display an up-to-date stock history for IBM. It was generated by a few lines of R code that Jeroen published to OpenCPU, and I called from this blog post using the OpenCPU API. You can publish your own code there as well, and share new data science techniques implemented in R in the same way. 

As an open platform, be aware that any everything you do and post on OpenCPU should be considered public, and so isn't suitable for anything that contains private or sensitive data. If you're looking for a secure platform for distributing R code, where access to sensitive or resource-intensive code needs to be restricted to authenticated users, then you should take a look at the RevoDeployR platform from Revolution Analytics. (Jeroen gave a presentation about the use of RevoDeployR to address such issues at the useR! 2010 conference.)

OpenCPU: Documentation

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