distcomp

Install this package the usual way in R or via:

library(devtools)
install_github("hrpcisd/distcomp")

Then, you will find a document that describes several examples installed under the R library tree. For example:

list.files(system.file("doc", package = "distcomp"))
list.files(system.file("doc_src", package = "distcomp"))

The examples described in the Journal of Statistical Software paper are available as follows:

list.files(system.file("ex", package = "distcomp"))

Use of this package requires some configuration. In particular, to run the examples on a local machine where a single opencpu server will be emulating several sites, a suitable R profile needs to be set up. That profile will be something along the lines of

library(distcomp)
distcompSetup(workspace = "full_path_to_workspace_directory",
              ssl_verifyhost = 0L, ssl_verifypeer = 0L)

where the workspace is a directory that the opencpu server can serialize objects to. On Unix or Mac, the above can be inserted into an .Rprofile file, but on Windows, we find that the Rprofile.site file needs to contain the above lines.

The effect of this is that every R process (including the opencpu process) has access to the distcomp library and the workspace.

OSX Yosemite Issues (10.10.4 and below)

In some earlier versions of Yosemite (MacOS 10.10.2 for example) there were issues with the opencpu package. We suspected it had more to do with Yosemite than opencpu or httpuv---see the number of DNS resolver issues people are having with the move to discoveryd via a google search.

Furthermore, even if opencpu came up, which it did sometimes after many tries, you were better off using the ip address 127.0.0.1 in the url in place of localhost due to those DNS problems.

We no longer see this problem in recent versions of Yosemite (10.10.5+).