Publications by Jeroen Ooms
Upcoming talks about jsonlite and mongolite
This summer I will be giving an invited talk at the annual French R Meeting in Grenoble as well as a shorter talk at UseR 2015 in Aalborg. The presentations will feature some recent R packages in the json/web space (curl, jsonlite, mongolite, V8), and show how these tools can be combined for building interoperable data pipelines with R. Below the...
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Getting started with MongoDB in R
The first stable version of the new mongolite package has appeared on CRAN. Mongolite builds on jsonlite to provide a simple, high-performance MongoDB client for R, which makes storing and accessing small or large data as easy as converting it to/from JSON. The package vignette has some examples to get you started with inserting, json queries, ag...
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New package commonmark: yet another markdown parser?
Last week the commonmark package was released on CRAN. The package implements some very thin R bindings to John Macfarlane’s (author of pandoc) cmark library. From the cmark readme: cmark is the C reference implementation of CommonMark, a rationalized version of Markdown syntax with a spec. It provides a shared library (libcmark) with functions...
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The curl package: a modern R interface to libcurl
TL;DR: Check out the vignette or the development version of httr. The package I put most time and effort in this year is curl. Last week version 0.8 was published on CRAN which fixes the last outstanding bug for Solaris. The package is pretty much done at this point: stable, well tested, and does everything it needs to; nothing more nothing less...
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HTTPS for CRAN: how and why
R gained some basic support for https in version 3.2.0 (see NEWS) via the method = "libcurl" argument in base functions download.file and url. The global option download.file.method is used to make this the default. Unfortunately the implementation has a few limitations: there is no way to set request options (authentication, proxy, headers, TLS ...
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Secure password hashing in R with bcrypt
The new package bcrypt provides an R interface to the OpenBSD ‘blowfish’ password hashing algorithm described in A Future-Adaptable Password Scheme by Niels Provos. The implementation is derived from the py-bcrypt module for Python which is a wrapper for the OpenBSD implementation. Bcrypt is used for secure password hashing. The main differen...
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OpenCPU Release 1.5
Following a few weeks of testing, OpenCPU 1.5 has been released. OpenCPU is a production-ready framework for embedded statistical computing with R. The system provides a neat API for remotely calling R functions over HTTP via e.g. JSON or Protocol Buffers. The OpenCPU server implementation is very stable and has been thorougly tested. It runs on ...
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Mongolite 0.5: authentication and iterators
A new version of the mongolite package has appeared on CRAN. Mongolite builds on jsonlite to provide a simple, high-performance MongoDB client for R, which makes storing small or large data in a database as easy as converting it to/from JSON. Have a look at the vignette or useR2015 slides to get started with inserting, json queries, aggregation a...
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Curl 0.9.2: tweaks and proxies for windows
Version 0.9.2 of curl has been released to CRAN. The curl package implements a modern and flexible web client for R and is the foundation for the popular httr package. This update includes mostly tweaks for Windows. Faster downloading Alex Deng from Microsoft had diagnosed a problem with curl_fetch_memory (which is used by httr) being slower than...
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Sodium: A Modern and Easy-to-Use Crypto Library
This week a new package called sodium was released on CRAN. This package implements bindings to libsodium: a modern, easy-to-use software library for encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing and more. Libsodium is actually a portable fork of Daniel Bernstein’s famous NaCL crypto library, which provides core operations needed to buil...
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