Support for R, Shiny

[Ed2uiz]

Hello,

Is it possible to use mosaic with R or Shiny? If not, are there any plans to make this possible? I know that vega and altair have made their way into R packages (vegalite, vegabrite, etc...) through the htmlwidgets framework, though I'm not sure how relevant they are to making mosaic compatible with R. Regardless, it would be great to be able to use mosaic visualizations through R at some point and look forward to reading any feedback or pointers on how to make this happen.

Thanks,
Ed

[jheer]

Thanks for asking! Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with the R ecosystem to say. In theory it should be possible if Shiny (or something similar) supports message passing (e.g., over a web socket connection) from a browser-based component to a custom R handler (which would proxy access to a DuckDB instance running in R). This is the basic architecture that the Mosaic Jupyter widget for Python follows. Maybe others more knowledgeable about R can chime in...

[Ed2uiz]

Hello @jheer, I was able to work on this project alongside a talented student @TiRizvanov via the rMosaic package, which is now on CRAN! It's missing a proper R-native spec generating API, but it supports htmlwidgets and shiny via multiple spec formats. Also copying @rpruim and @kcarnold from #929 in case there's still interest, feedback + contributions welcome. Thanks!

[jheer]

Hello @jheer, I was able to work on this project alongside a talented student @TiRizvanov via the rMosaic package, which is now on CRAN! It's missing a proper R-native spec generating API, but it supports htmlwidgets and shiny via multiple spec formats. Also copying @rpruim and @kcarnold from #929 in case there's still interest, feedback + contributions welcome. Thanks!

That's fantastic. Very glad to see this!