I presented rApache to the public for the first time at the Directions in Statistical Computing workshop in August 2005 (paper), almost seven years ago. It might have been novel, maybe even crazy at the time, but I think rApache showed people a new way to bring R to the web.

I presented brew, a templating framework for mixing HTML and R code, on a poster at useR! 2007. When used with rApache, it’s basically just like using PHP… but with R.

I wrote rApache to scratch an itch. I wrote brew on a whim, just to see if I could do it. They’re both open source, so anyone can use them or change them, but I’m kind of bored with them.

I like shiny. shiny is the web application framework I had hoped to write one day, but I had lost motivation and what’s worse lost touch with what was going on in the web programming space.

I’m going to write shiny applications like this one now.

Disclaimer: I helped implement the shiny server running on RStudio’s beta site. It’ll be open sourced soon.