[Zope] Zope and R

[A.J. Rossini]

>>>>> "RB" == Ragnar Beer <rbeer@uni-goettingen.de> writes:

    RB> Thanks a lot! RSPython seems to be the most likely candidate
    RB> for my purposes. I actually don't need R's interactive
    RB> features in this case. What I need is a Python script that
    RB> accesses an SQL database, unpickles data that is stored in a
    RB> blob, and then generates an image (a rather large GIF) with a
    RB> predefined style or calculates a couple of coefficients.
    RB> Generating images seems to be the hardest part. How are you
    RB> handling temporary files with more than one concurrent thread
    RB> and possible security issues? I've never used temporary files
    RB> so far.

If you want this to really work, I'd go one further than Seb's
"critical" comments (remember, I'm an academic, I can afford crashes,
especially of the "crash early, crash often" in research projects :-),
and suggest using Python, PIL, or GDchart for this, NOT R.   Really,
"right tools for the job", "stability", and all that stuff.

Instead, for numerics, I'd suggest NumPy or SciPy (both excellent,
though lacking some (all!)  of S/R's better features for data analysis
and annotation), for the computations.

I've done just as well with Python's SQL methods as I've done with R's
(maybe better), and there are a number of Zope products for doing what
you are proposing.

Python seems to be a better choice -- I've been doing Flow Cytometry
analysis in both R and Python (flow cyt files are like the files you
are describing) and Python definitely has better behaviour (not to
mention that you'll have a 1-2 second start-up cost server-side for
getting R "fired up").

Now if you are looking at incorporating R for a "lab
workbench/notebook" style project, that would be a another story...

best,
-tony

-- 
A.J. Rossini				Rsrch. Asst. Prof. of Biostatistics
U. of Washington Biostatistics		rossini@u.washington.edu	
FHCRC/SCHARP/HIV Vaccine Trials Net	rossini@scharp.org
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