Cross-origin requests with beakr

beakr is a lightweight and flexible web framework that allows you to incorporate R code as the Middleware responsible for handling web requests. At Mazama Science, we developed beakr to simplify the process of creating R-based web services that we use to deliver a variety of products: data files, images, rendered Rmarkdown documents, etc.

In this article, we discuss using beakr to set a CORS header and create an example beakr instance that can respond to cross-origin javascript requests.

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Web Frameworks for R – A Brief Overview

Having recently announced the beakr web framework for R, we have received several questions about context and why we choose beakr over other options for some of our web services. This post will attempt to answer some of those questions by providing a few opinions on beakr and other web frameworks for R.

The comparison will by no means be exhaustive but will attempt to briefly summarize some of the key features each web framework has to offer. While there are some differences in the approach each package takes to developing web services, they all share similar basic functionality. In the end, the choice of a particular framework will come down largely to personal preference.

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