Let me ask, maybe you know: say I want to build a finance app that basically crunches a lot of data accessed from a DB, does some pretty intricate subsetting of the data, and produces Excel reports (XML). I currently do this with about 1300 lines of R code and a SQLite DB. Pretty lean and easy to use (was a bitch to write, tho, really stretched my understanding of lexical scoping and functional programming). If I wanted to webify this, the main challenge that I think I face is finding a framework that allows me to do all that nitty gritty data subsetting and summarizing - this is where R is really excellent, more flexible and expressive than SQL. What framework, if any, might you recommend? What kind of stack would be good for a beginner?
Most good libraries for interacting with DBs and Excel documents are written for the backend, so you’ll probably want to use Node with a simple web server like Express to serve pages, and do your heavy calculations, report generation, and DB stuff on the Node server. Making a server seems complex but Express is quite easy-- you can get a functional web server in like 10 lines of code.
As for what framework would be good to use for the actual calculations, unfortunately I don’t have any recommendations. Generally I find that JS has enough by default to do decently complex grouping, summarizing, subsetting, calculating, etc. operations. You’ll probably want to use the “new” (now pretty old) array methods Map and Reduce, and new stuff like groupBy could be helpful. If you have any specific questions I should be able to answer them.
Oh, okay. Still more doable than you might think, but of course not trivial. Good luck!
Let me ask, maybe you know: say I want to build a finance app that basically crunches a lot of data accessed from a DB, does some pretty intricate subsetting of the data, and produces Excel reports (XML). I currently do this with about 1300 lines of R code and a SQLite DB. Pretty lean and easy to use (was a bitch to write, tho, really stretched my understanding of lexical scoping and functional programming). If I wanted to webify this, the main challenge that I think I face is finding a framework that allows me to do all that nitty gritty data subsetting and summarizing - this is where R is really excellent, more flexible and expressive than SQL. What framework, if any, might you recommend? What kind of stack would be good for a beginner?
Apologies for the wait!
Most good libraries for interacting with DBs and Excel documents are written for the backend, so you’ll probably want to use Node with a simple web server like Express to serve pages, and do your heavy calculations, report generation, and DB stuff on the Node server. Making a server seems complex but Express is quite easy-- you can get a functional web server in like 10 lines of code.
As for what framework would be good to use for the actual calculations, unfortunately I don’t have any recommendations. Generally I find that JS has enough by default to do decently complex grouping, summarizing, subsetting, calculating, etc. operations. You’ll probably want to use the “new” (now pretty old) array methods Map and Reduce, and new stuff like groupBy could be helpful. If you have any specific questions I should be able to answer them.