A revolution is happening

This week, I finally found time to explore a revolutionary tool in the data analytics field.

If you're an R or Python programmer, you know this scenario: you share your analysis but the reader is frustrated because they would like to tweak your code to test a few things.

If you're a web developer, you know how hard it is to incorporate complex statistical methods into your JavaScript applications.

There's now a solution for this:

→ webR

Note: Pyodide is the equivalent for Python!

Take a look!

webR is a technology that enables your browser to run R code.

For example, you can

• create a Quarto HTML report,
• publish it online for free using GitHub,
• and webR will let users interact with and modify the R code right from the browser!

Read article with live example

Another example: you can build UI components like in a Shiny app, and publish it without needing a Shiny server.

Screenshot: a tiny shiny app in a Quarto doc. No server, 100% free, can handle 1M users simultaneously.

Revolutionary, but

I feel like many people don't yet grasp how revolutionary this is because the underlying tech is hard to understand.

That's why I've made a few diagrams to help explain it.

Quarto? Shiny? WebR? Github pages? Static vs Dynamic site? HTML widgets? I've tried to explain them all as simply as possible!

Everything is summarized in a new bonus lesson of my Productive R Workflow course.

Read my article about webR

See you next Saturday!
Yan

PS: if you're using webR / pyodide already, I would LOVE to hear about your use-case.

PPS: it took me forever to make those diagrams. Please tell me if it helped you understand the concepts! 🙏