Building Enterprise applications using R, BIOCEP and GWT

R is a powerful open source Analytic platform. The power of R lies within the fact that an active scientific community develops and uses it. With the cost of software rising at a fast pace, businesses are realizing the need to move to open source technologies from costly proprietory software. R if therefore, now, finding a great customer base in the business world. Many enterprises have started exploring the option of using R. It has a comprehensive list of algorithms provided by the contributed packages. It also provides advanced visualizaiton techniques.

Although R has very strong algorithmic support, it lacks in presenting a user friendly solution that could be used accross an enterprise. What business users need is a point and click solution that can not only provide them the math but also the capability to interpret the result, and walk them through the analytic process.

In this blog i provide a solution to the problem but combining the power of R, BIOCEP and GWT. Before i get started, here’s a short introduction to BIOCEP and GWT:

BIOCEP – (http://biocep-distrib.r-forge.r-project.org/) Developed by Karin Chine, biocep is a beautiful piece of code that can tranform R from a command line program to a truly enterprise wide, cloud computing enabled analytic platform. We will explore the capability of biocep to provide a master-servant kind of architechture.

GWT – Google Widget Toolkit – Developed by Google, GWT can be used to develop rich internet applications at a fast pace. The power of GWT lies in the fact that the developer develops and debugs the complete application in Java and the toolkit takes care of the rest. Combined with smartgwt, it provides an ideal solution for developing rich web applications.

For those of you who are impatient, here’s a diagram that summarizes the solution.

R-BIOCEP architechture

Here are the steps to building the application.

1. Download biocep core.