Remote communication with R – How to start with an R GUI client to access R on a remote Server

Question

I tried RInside's Qt example qdensity and really liked it. It was easy to setup and I was surprised how easy it was to understand and modify given that I have virtually no Qt experience. Now I wonder whether it is possible to use RInside with R somewhere on a remote machine.

It seems that I cannot use RInside for this purpose. I wonder whether there is another way of creating a Qt Desktop app, that communicates with R on some server. I got R Studio Server running and I am really happy with it, but it's for the R people. In order to promote my R stuff within our institute also among non-R people I would like to offer a simple, very limited GUI that can do basics things like showin' some graph or starting a R CMD Batch. I also know shiny (and shiny server) and have been actively testing it recently, but I am looking for a simple Desktop client go connect with my server-side R.

Is there a basis to start out with Rserve and Qt? Any suggestions (where to start, examples, generally bad idea) ???

What are R's capabilities to handle something like this IPC or D-Bus stuff.

Answer 1

Use Qt with C++, and just process the files that you create with R on you're server. So for example: create the graphic and save in a format that you can load. BMP, PNG etc. Load it to you're GUI.

Also I suggest Qt Creator for GUI design. Its fast and simple. This idea only fits you if you don't want to stay in in R environment.