George Stagg Senior Software Engineer Posit PBC (UK) LinkedIn · gws.phd November 22 · Online · English talk

Data Visualisation in the Browser with WebAssembly and webR

Earlier this year webR was released, a version of the statistical language R compiled for WebAssembly (wasm). Wasm is a technology that enables software that’s normally compiled for a specific computer system to instead run anywhere, including inside web browsers. With webR, data science and visualisation code written in R can be run and displayed directly in the browser, without the need for a supporting computational R server.

Users have already begun building new data visualisation experiences with webR on the web. The latest release includes improvements to graphics, accessibility and internationalisation, expanded support for Wasm R packages, and includes the ability to run fully client-side R Shiny apps.

In this talk, I’ll introduce webR and discuss some details of how the system works. I’ll show some examples of running interactive R code in the browser, and discuss the potential for how this can change the way data science is taught and delivered. I’ll discuss how webR enables integration of the R data science stack with native JavaScript visualisation libraries. Finally, I’ll show you how you can get started with the newly released version of Shinylive so that you can create your own pure client-side interactive data visualisation applications using the Shiny R package.

BIO

George is a senior software engineer working on the webR project as part of the Open Source Team at Posit. A former academic, George also has experience with teaching and research in computational mathematics, statistics and physics. When not working with software, George enjoys hacking hardware, photography, fantasy & sci-fi, and tinkering with electronic synthesisers.