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This is not REST API per se, but it's something that we've used in production for a couple years now and it's working like a charm

https://github.com/robertzk/microserver https://github.com/kirillseva/rain

This way our rails app can communicate with R prediction backend and we end up using the right tool for each task

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Thanks! Just a question: is this microserver blocking? I mean when a request takes 2-3 sec, can it server other requests in parallel?

It's a wrapper around https://github.com/rstudio/httpuv

I'm pretty sure it's blocking though, R doesn't really have good concurrency primitives. However, you can launch multiple R processes behind nginx and be able to serve N requests concurrently. Running this in an autoscaling group on AWS provides enough resilience in practice

Yes, R is missing those, but there is some workarounds, like Shiny server (enterprise version) and OpenCPU for instance.

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