🧪 A Moderately More Useful WebR Experiment

See it live before reading!

Getting Some Work Done

WebR will be used in many web contexts, whether it be powering dashboards without the need for a "server", filling in statistical gaps in the javascript ecosystem, or just having fun!

In this experiment, we're doing some more serious work with what may be one typical application of WebR: using it to analyze user-supplied data. This will not become a ubiquitous use case until there's a solution to the "stall" when loading packages and the ability to get more packages requiring compilation into the WebR universe. But, we can frame out the concept in a small app that:

• lets you upload a CSV
• do some analysis on it in R (which, for experiment brevity, is R's summary() function)
• show the first few rows of data (we'll do that with the JS arquero package just to intro that to R folks)
• use base R's plot() function to plot data frame using a theme from {basetheme}

Instead of including the R files from {basetheme} like we did with a previous experiment, we're riffing from @timelyportfolio's experiment where he figured out a neat way to install built packages from rOpenSci's R Universe.

I'm a bit pressed for time this morning, so here's a just a rough guide to grok what's going on:

• wc/file-drop.js is a Lit component to handle the file selection and initial data reading
• wc/file-target.js is another Lit component to handle the displays of plots and tables
• r.js has some new functions which make it easier to install packages from R Universe
• main.js does all the package loading

I'll exposit more when time allows.

You can find the source for this experiment on GitHub