Publications by Jeroen Ooms
Compression Benchmarks: brotli, gzip, xz, bz2
Brotli is a new compression algorithm optimized for the web, in particular small text documents. Brotli decompression is at least as fast as for gzip while significantly improving the compression ratio. The price we pay is that compression is much slower than gzip. Brotli is therefore most effective for serving static content such as fonts and ht...
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The ‘rsvg’ Package: High Quality Image Rendering in R
The new rsvg package renders (vector based) SVG images into high-quality bitmap arrays. The resulting image is an array of 3 dimensions: height * width * 4 (RGBA) and can be written to png, jpeg or webp format: # create an svg image library(svglite) library(ggplot2) svglite("plot.svg", width = 10, height = 7) qplot(mpg, wt, data = mtcars, colour ...
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Using webp in R: A New Format for Lossless and Lossy Image Compression
A while ago I blogged about the brotli, a new general purpose compression algorithm which Google promotes as an alternative to gzip. The same company also happens to be working on a new format for images called webp, which is actually a derivative of the VP8 video format. Google claims webp provides superior compression for both lossless (png) an...
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New in V8: Calling R, from JavaScript, from R, from Javascript…
The V8 package provides an R interface to Google’s open source JavaScript engine. The package is completely self contained and requires no runtime dependencies, making it very easy to execute JavaScript code from R. A hand full of CRAN packages use V8 to provide R bindings to useful JavaScript libraries. Have a look at the v8 vignette to get st...
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Commonmark: Super Fast Markdown Rendering in R
A few months ago I first announced the commonmark R package. Since then there have been a few more releases… time for an update! What is CommonMark? Markdown is used in many places these days, however the original spec actually leaves some ambiguity which makes it difficult to optimize and leads to inconsistencies between implementations. Comm...
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OpenCPU Server Release 1.5.4
Version 1.5.4 of the OpenCPU server has been released to Launchpad (Ubuntu) and OBS (Fedora). This update does not introduce any changes to the OpenCPU API itself; it improves to the deb/rpm installation packages and upgrades the bundled opencpu system R package library. Installing and Updating Existing Ubuntu and Fedora serves that are already r...
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Hunspell: Spell Checker and Text Parser for R
Hunspell is the spell checker library used in LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Mac OS X, InDesign, and a few more. Base R has some spell checking functionality via the aspell function which wraps the aspell or hunspell command line program on supported systems. The new hunspell R package on the other hand directly links to...
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Stemming and Spell Checking in R
Last week we introduced the new hunspell R package. This week a new version was released which adds support for additional languages and text analysis features. Additional languages By default hunspell uses the US English dictionary en_US but the new version allows for checking and analyzing in other languages as well. The ?hunspell help page ha...
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Faster arrays and matrices in jsonlite 0.9.20
Yesterday a new version of the jsonlite package was released to CRAN. This update includes no new features, it only introduces performance optimizations. Large Matrices The jsonlite package was already highly optimized for converting vectors and data frames to json. However Gregory Jefferis and Duncan Murdoch had found that conversion of tall mat...
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OpenCPU release 1.6
Following a few weeks of testing, OpenCPU 1.6 has been released. OpenCPU is a production-ready system for embedded statistical computing with R. It provides a neat API for remotely calling R functions over HTTP via e.g. JSON or Protocol Buffers. The OpenCPU server implementation is stable and has been thorougly tested. It runs on all major Linux ...
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