[maxi-k]

This is an awesome project. We recently used it to build a statically hosted EC2 instance comparison website, using this for plotting (ggplot2) and DuckDB-Wasm for querying the instance data. Only the first page load is slow b/c of all the wasm and R packages, but it's fast for interactive querying and plotting and was really easy to create.

[carbocation]

If the URL is public, it would be neat to see if you want to share it.

[maxi-k]

Sure! https://cloudspecs.fyi/ (feedback welcome!)

Since it's now accepted, I guess I can also share the accompanying paper [1] about cloud hardware evolution; the idea is that every plot in the paper is clickable and opens an interactive version of itself. WebR was perfect for this use case.

https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/clouds...

[cscheid]

(Disclosure: I work on https://quarto.org, for the same company that the author of WebR works on) Thanks for sharing that PDF link. It's so good! Would you be willing to write a bit about how you produced that PDF? It's a great example of what places like CIDR should be encouraging in terms of academic publications.

[maxi-k]

I didn't know Quarto, it looks interesting, thanks for sharing!

cloudspecs encodes the entire state (sql code, R code, view state) in the URL compressed and base64 encoded, since we wanted to be able to send links around to share interesting plots/tables with each other and revisit old plots if the data changes, e.g., if new EC2 instances come out.

The PDF is produced by good old latex, and the state-in-URL mechanism allows us to just use regular hyperlinks for the clickable plot. The limit is the max URL length browsers allow, but we haven't hit it.

Since we use R+ggplot for research anyway in the local environment (emacs+RSS), we just copied the code into cloudspecs, then copied the resulting link into latex. So a bit of manual work if we want to change the plots in the paper.

Let me know if you're curious about specific things or want to collaborate. Cheers!

[jansim]

I love this, thanks for sharing! Linking to interactive versions of figures is such a great idea and use of WASM.

[maxi-k]

Thanks! We hope other papers will adopt the idea as well. I think most use either python+matplotlib or R+ggplot for figures, so WebR is a real win.

Since it's only static files, you can also imagine "reproducibility archives" that you can just run in the browser (hopefully) years later w/o installing anything.

[georgestagg]

This is great! Thanks for sharing!

[maxi-k]

Well, based on your username, thanks for WebR! It took an hour or two to integrate with our DuckDB-Wasm prototype and just worked(TM). Really fantastic.