A brand new and shiny version of rfoaas is now on CRAN. The rfoaas package provides an interface for R to the most excellent FOAAS service–which provides a modern, scalable and RESTful web service for the frequent need to tell someone to f$#@ off.

There are two (internal) changes of merit in this version. First off, as FOAAS was refactored upstream, we are now forced to supply an accept: text/plain http request header. Which, sadly enough, is not something the url() function in R can do—so we brought in more cavalry and now depend on the httr package by Hadley, and use its GET() method. A second change is that we added a (simple but effective enough) regression test which simply calls all foaas entry points available throug rfoaas, and compares this to the anticipated result. To run it, you need to set an environment variable RunFOAASTests=yes as eg out Travis script does. Finally, we aligned the version number with upstream to signal that we cover all available entry points of that version.

As usual, CRANberries provides a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.