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R programming language is one of the preferred environments for running statistical analyses across the scientific community. However, the usage of the R language raises an important drawback: it requires command-line and coding skills to be able to use it in an effective way. Moreover, the complexity of some R operations and calculations could increase the difficulty in the interpretations of some results, even for expert users. The aim of this document is to explain the basis of the solution proposed to increase the usability of the family of CoExpNets R packages (Author: Juan A. Botía).
Over the last few decades, the Internet has experienced huge growth, reaching 2160 million users only in Asia in 2018. Due to the huge expansion of mobile devices, it is also undeniable that a web-page format is the most well-known and accepted way of browsing the Internet around the world. In this sense, a web-page structure was chosen to make CoExpNets R packages easily accessible to every potential user around the world, at any time and from any device they decide to do so.
CoExpNets (author: Juan A. Botía) is formed by a family of seven R packages. To serve CoExpNets functionality through a web-based interface served by an APACHE server, it was necessary to generate an intermediate layer between the R environment and the web-based user interface. The R package used to reach this goal was Plumber. Plumber is an R package that allows creating a web Application Programming Interface (API) by simply adding some extra comments to the R code. After generating the API, we developed a Model View Controller (MVC) web-based interface using the ASP.NET Core framework. ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform and open-source .NET framework that allows creating MVC applications for different operating systems, including Linux. The webserver chosen to serve CoExp Web Application was Apache HTTP Server Project. The routing of CoExp ASP.NET Core libraries, which are natively served by a Kestrel server, and APACHE server was done by a reverse-proxy service.
CoExp Web Application is hosted at University of Murcia.
@ 2019 - CoExp_Web
