[stateofinquiry]

Impressive how nice this looks, and I am also impressed by how quickly it runs. I don't know who did this (could not find any "about" info), but kudos on a job well done.

However: Aside from the above, and doing it "because one can", I don't understand why anyone would spend the effort to make this. R is FOSS software, if you can run a web browser, you can run R itself. R is not hard to install or maintain. Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.

So, I am a strange combination of impressed with this site and confounded trying to figure out why it exists. I'm probably missing something.

[electroly]

This project is brand new to me but I have a use case I'm immediately considering, when combined with the "shiny" dashboard library as seen here: https://shinylive.io/r/examples/

At work we have analysts who sometimes produce web-based dashboards for the business to consume. When we had Python folks, they used Plotly Dash and we had to host a server for them. It's a bit silly--the dashboard just accesses APIs and static data, crunches a bit, and renders some HTML. There's no inherent need for it to require its own server. There is "WebDash" [1] but I have not gotten it to work and it says it's alpha quality.

Now that we're getting into R, I don't have any path to production for dashboards. I want to avoid getting into another Plotly Dash situation where every analyst with a one-time idea ends up creating long-term IT burden. Enter WebR: now we only need to serve static files. That's a lot easier; I can serve essentially an unlimited number of dashboards from existing infra this way. Our client machines are beefy with tons of headroom and our EC2 instances are as small as possible, so shifting work from the server to the client makes sense here. I'm gonna try it and see if I've missed something.

[1] https://github.com/ibdafna/webdash

[fn-mote]

Use case: teaching classes.

On HN, it seems trivial to install software, but for most people it is not.

Also, tablet and Chromebook users.

[levocardia]

Yes, the first 15-20 min of every programming presentation I ever went to was "getting it set up on your computer." Very wasteful!

[ekianjo]

> I don't know who did this

I believe it's George Stagg https://github.com/georgestagg

[kevmo314]

> Running in a web browser requires network, and resources on someone else's machine.

The site is running completely locally. You can disable your network in devtools and it will continue to work.

[apwheele]

When you want to run stuff client side instead of your server is one question to determine.

For R specifically, it is focused on stats/graphing. So if you wanted an app where someone could upload data and fit a complicated regression model, this would be a good use case. (There are probably javascript libraries for regression, but if willing to live with the bit of start up lag, worth it for anything mildly complicated -- factors in R for example would not like to worry about writing my own code in javascript to make the design matrix.)

In the case where you run the server, the data has to travel to your server, your computer estimates the model, and it sends it back. WASM apps this all happens client side.

It is a good use case for dynamic graphs/dashboards as well. If the data is small enough to entirely fit in memory, can basically have a local interactive session with the data and everything will be quite snappy (do not need to continually go back and forth with your server to query data).