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Comment by maxi-k | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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...

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

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.

(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.

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!

This is great! Thanks for sharing!

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.

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