Want to talk to R? just call your plumber

Abstract

Web APIs (RESTful APIs) are used everywhere to integrate various apps, across platforms and on the web. The way web APIs work is that by visiting some link with additional parameters appended to the link, you get a response, i.e., a json file, with meaningful results. In essense, the plumber package enables us, R developers, to share our code’s products as a web API. This is a good solution when you want to facilitate an easy integration for your clients, without having to expose your R code and your intellectual property. In my short talk, I will present what are web APIs, I will demonstrate how to calla web API with httr and finally explain the necessary steps to build up your own functional web api from the ground up.