Asynchronous processing is critical for performing a wide array of tasks, from high performance computing to web services. Communication between these disparate asynchronous processes is often required. Currently the statistical computing language R provides no built in features to handle interprocess communication between R processes while they are performing computations. Several packages have been written to handle the passing of text or binary data between processes (e.g. txtq, liteq, and zmq). ipc allows you to easily pass R objects between processes along with an associated signal, and have handler functions automatically execute them in the receiving process.
There is particular focus on supporting asynchronous evaluation in Shiny applications. Examples are included in the package showing how to perform useful tasks such as:
- Updating reactive values from within future
- Progress bars for long running async tasks
- Interrupting async tasks based on user input.
To install the latest version from CRAN run:
install.packages("ipc")
To install the latest development version from the github repo run:
# If devtools is not installed:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("fellstat/ipc")
- For a more detailed description of what can be done with the
ipcpackage, see the introductory vignette.
To run an example application locally use:
library(ipc)
shinyExample()