Vignette on web server options in R

[JosiahParry]

As suggested by @eddelbuettel, document REST / web server alternatives in the R space.

Notably RestRserve is a complete replacement for plumber & valve itself. Personal opinion is that plumber is less performant (probably) but has a lot of niceties such as generating open API docs automatically, etc.

Plumber is built ontop of httpuv which can be used as an alternative

Rook last commit was 2017 not sure if its still in use?

[JosiahParry]

OpenCPU is the other that I couldnt remember

[eddelbuettel]

We may be talking slightly past each other, and if so this may well be my fault for not groking what you are going about but to me the situation has nothing to do with 'web servers' or 'serving files from R' but more simply with providing REST entry points to (for example) provide an easy and fast predict() method given a simple covariate vector.

plumbr made this easy and possible. This came at a cost, the ease of use means it is not all that fast / performant for thousands of requests.

RestRserve solved precisely that problem. It is used in production, at scale, to server ML models.

valve appears to focus on being better at what plumbr does. By ignoring RestRserve in your otherwise compelling salesmanship you are providing an incomplete picture of the overall situation. I, and I suppose others, would love to see a three-way comparison between plumbr, RestRserve and valve.

[eddelbuettel]

And then there are other endeavours like the (now-defunct) Syberia project (more at https://github.com/syberia/) which came out of local fintech that (as early as a decade) very much served R-based ML prediction models (of the classic classifier type) at scale.