In one of my webservices I am using R with the "rinruby" Ruby library to
calculate statistics, do pathway analysis (with Bioconductor) and to
create graphs. So far works without problems (in contrast to the
"rsruby" gem).  As Ruby and R communicate through TCP/IP sockets, it
should be fairly straightforward to wrap rinruby in a REST webservice
(i.e. POST R code to the service and get the results back) - it just has
to be done.

If we intend however to achieve full OpenTox compatibility we would need
to translate e.g.  Dataset representations into R objects (data frames,
...) and back - this does not look so easy (although I am certain it can
be done, maybe even better within R with an "opentox" package).

Best regards,
Christoph

Excerpts from Rajarshi Guha's message of Fri May 07 16:21:23 +0200 2010:
> That'd be great - been playing with Rapache which would make this
> relatively trivial (though R SOAP services are aslo available via IU)
> 
> On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Egon Willighagen
> <egon.willighagen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Barry Hardy
> > <barry.hardy at douglasconnect.com> wrote:
> >> Joanna recommended GeNIe to me for support of a Bayesian Net service
> >> (http://genie.sis.pitt.edu/about.html).  However, although it is freeware, I
> >> don't see an OS license, so we should also look around at alternatives.
> >>  Suggestions?
> >
> > Did anyone develop services using R in the background? That would pave
> > to way to many different statistical methods...
> >
> > Egon
> >
> > --
> > Post-doc @ Uppsala University
> > Proteochemometrics / Bioclipse Group of Prof. Jarl Wikberg
> > Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/
> > Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/
> > PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
>