[R] Sending graphics output to connections

[Tim Churches]

In the first issue of the excellent R news, Brian D. Ripley muses [1]:

"What can I do with connections? ... In short, almost everything you used to
do with files. The exceptions are the graphics devices which write to files,
and it is not yet clear if it is beneficial to be able to send graphics
outputs to connections. ..."

One benefit would be the ability to stream graphics back to a (possibly
remote) client of the R session, such as a Web browser or even an "R thin
client" which communicates with an R process on a server somewhere. The
other part of this scenario, that is, remote controlling an R session from a
socket, is, as Prof. Ripley notes, already planned and can currently be
fudged in V1.2.1 with an explicit loop reading and evaluating lines of input
from a pipe connection as illustrated in the article.

[1] Ripley BD. Connections. <I>R News</I> 2001;1(1):16-17. Available at
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/ Accessed on 2001-Jan-27.

(<I>...</I> denotes italics. I think that is the correct citation for an
e-journal in Vancouver format, but would appreciate suggestions or
corrections.)

Tim Churches


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