Related projects

Bioinformatics

Cloud computing

rpy2 is among the many bioinformatics-oriented packages provided with CloudBioLinux. Check it out if you are considering a project involving cloud computing.

Bioconductor

Bioconductor is a popular set of R packages for bioinformatics. A number of classes defined within that project are exposed as Python classes through rpy2, in the project rpy2-bioconductor-extensions. The bioconductor project is evolving quite rapidely the mapping might not longer be working.

The blog of Brad Chapman also has good examples about how to use rpy2 for bioinformatics tasks (or Python for bioinformatics in general).

Interactive consoles

Data analysts often like to work interactively, that is going through short cycles like:

• write a bit of code, which can be mostly involving a call to an existing function
• run that code
• inspect the results, often using plots and figures

R users will be particularly familiar with this sort of approach, and will likely want it when working with rpy2.

Obviously the Python console can be used, but there exist improvements to it, making the user experience more pleasant with features such as history and autocompletion.

Other interactive environments

• bpython: curse-based enhancement to the Python console
• emacs: the Emacs text editor can be used to host a python session, or an ipython session

Embeddeding an R console

Python can be used to develop full-fledged applications, including applications with a graphical user interface.

rpy2 can be used to provide an R console embedded in such applications, or build an alternative R GUI.

When offering an R console, the developer(s) may want to retain control on the the way interaction with R is handled, at the level of the console and for the base R functions targetting interactivity (see Section Callbacks).

The RPyGTK project demonstrates how rpy2 can be used to implement a full-blown GUI for R using python.

Alternative interfaces

The rtools package proposes additions / customizations of the higher-level interface in rpy2.

The pandas <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pandas> package proposes an interpretation of data frames in Python, tied to numpy structures. A custom interfacing with rpy2 is mentioned, but it appears not as much developed as the rest of the project.

R-like data strucutures

R’s data frames are extremely convient when manipulating data. In rpy2 the original R data.frame is represented by rpy2.robjects.vectors.DataFrame, but the pydataframe project has a pure Python implementation of them (with a compatibility layer with rpy2 providing a seamless transition whenever needed.