What is the relationship between RStudio and RServe?

Question

I am new to R, and I decided to put R on the machine I have and see if I can remotely run the code that is on my desktop computer.

When searching for “how to do this,” I came across the names “Rserve” and “RStudio”. As far as I can tell, RServe is a package (actually it is a package) that I can use to configure the server, and RStudio is an IDE.

My question is: does RStudio use RServe under the hood? And if it is not, then how does RStudio compare with RServe? (Ie which one is better and why?)

[I realized that this question may be a duplicate, but I could not find a single similar question]

Answer 1

Rserve is a client server implementation written in pure c that starts the server and spawns several processes, each of which has its own workspace R. These are not threads, but processes due to R's limitation for multithreading. It uses the QAP packaging protocol as the primary form of transport between the client and server. You execute commands through the client (PHP, Java, C ++) to the server and return you REXP objects, which are essentially the R mappings that underlie the SEXP data objects. Rserve also offers a version of webcams that will transmit data through web ports, but the api is not documented. It also supports basic authentication through a configuration file.

Rstudio is a C ++ and gwt application that provides a web interface for accessing R. AFAIK uses json as the main transport and supports authentication through pam. Each user has a workspace configured in their home directory. It works on the server very similarly, but not the same as Rserve to communicate with R using RCPP. It also has its own build driver, used to wrap the plot device so that it can select plots to serve ui. It has much more functionality, for example, navigating through your code from ui variables and viewing the workspace.

Functionally, they are similar in that they provide a client / server connection with R, but IMHO the comparison stops there.

Answer 2

I believe that these are separate projects (although I could be wrong). I have never heard of RServe, and it seems that this is not mentioned in the documentation for RStudio. I have used and recommend RStudio Server. It is relatively easy to set up and super easy to use after setting it up. This is a useful guide for setting up a server on Amazon EC2:

#Create a user, home directory and set password sudo useradd rstudio sudo mkdir /home/rstudio sudo passwd rstudio #Enter Password sudo chmod -R 0777 /home/rstudio #Update all files from the default state sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade #Be Able to get R 3.0 sudo add-apt-repository 'deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu precise/' #Update files to use CRAN mirror #Don't worry about error message sudo apt-get update #Install latest version of R #Install without verification sudo apt-get install r-base #Install a few background files sudo apt-get install gdebi-core sudo apt-get install libapparmor1 #Change to a writeable directory #Download & Install RStudio Server cd /tmp wget http://download2.rstudio.org/rstudio-server-0.97.551-amd64.deb sudo gdebi rstudio-server-0.97.551-amd64.deb #Once you've installed the above commands, you can now access RStudio through your local browser. Navigate to the Public DNS of your image on port 8787, similar to: #http://ec2-50-19-18-120.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8787 

Answer 3

An earlier answer about the age of 3 provides old information such as here .

Updated Correction

RStudio is a company that provides the open source RStudio IDE for R. They also sell commercial services such as RStudio Server Pro, which sell themselves with load balancing and other things. A successful open source project has apparently paved the way for markets.