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The near term goal is to provide an exploration space where individuals could check out our R offerings without having to install any software. Just spin up an R Studio Server browser session with them logged into the Synapse client and download the entity that they were previously looking at on the web. Then play around with the SageBio-curated data and run simple training tutorials. We provide an R Studio session in a sandbox that gets wiped out after each user session. Specificly, in the very near term the first things to enable would be:
- Demo of the functionality by Mike / others to gauge interest levels
- Ability for Sage Bionetworks employees to play with the prototype to get deeper feedback
- Possibly, if it isn't too much trouble and the right situation arises, allow a close collaborator that we trust to also play with the system.
A longer term goal would be able to use the lessons we learn from this prototype to see whether it may be part of the larger solution for computation via Synapse.
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- A bonus feature would be if they use a shared Synapse cache, it should take less time for the download to occur, but we have to think about the implications of them looking at other datasets already in the cache and bypassing the use agreement logic.
- The crux of the issue is that to use R Studio Server, without major changes, the "RStudio login" has to match up with some UNIX account on the machine one to one, (if five users want to use R Studio Server on the same machine, there needs to be 5 separate UNIX accounts).
- When you use RStudio Server, you can write stuff to your home directory, so its important to clean up afterwards if someone else was going to reuse that same home directory. We can't do a simple round-robin over a fixed set of accounts without cleaning them up between use.
- RStudio Server is written in C++. We don't want to write or support a Synapse C++ client so we should look for solutions that minimize the amount of functionality Synapse-specific we add to RStudio Server as C++ code.
- RStudio Server also uses GWT. Need more detail here, but it may be the case that some of our web functionality could transfer over.
- RStudio Server has no tests. Hundreds of users download the development version on a regular basis and that is how they current test - wait for bug reports from users.
- The RStudio folks have only received one code contribution from an outside developer and they rejected it because the developer did not really understand the inner workings of RStudio Server. The take away is that if we have a contribution that we think should become part of the core project, we should have a design review with them before we code it.
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