The culmination of such an approach is realized in the Beaker Notebook (<a href="http://www.beakernotebook.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.beakernotebook.com</a>). You can not only switch between languages, but the environment allows you to share datasets between Groovy, Python, JS, Julia, Ruby etc ..<p>It's a work in progress, but something to watch out for, imho
Since the post linked to my ggplot2 tutorial, I should probably mention that I'm really not a fan of interactive charts/D3 for <i>static</i> content, because a) loading the data can dramatically increase the loading time of the webpage and b) interactive charts <i>will</i> break on mobile devices, so you need to invest time to QA that.<p>Rstudio now offers HTMLWidgets which allow for interactive chart generation natively, which is interesting: <a href="http://blog.rstudio.org/2014/12/18/htmlwidgets-javascript-data-visualization-for-r/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.rstudio.org/2014/12/18/htmlwidgets-javascript-da...</a>
Somewhat close in spirit to what seems like a never-ending side project I have: <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7702253/AlthingiJS-1.mov" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7702253/AlthingiJS-1.mov</a> Here I show Javascript and APL, but the plan is to eventually include at the very least also R. But so far I'm still rewriting what I have until I'm happy with it, so it's taking ages.
This is why I prefer using clojure + incanter.<p>You get interactive freechart dialogues (and much more).<p>Library: <a href="https://github.com/incanter/incanter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/incanter/incanter</a><p>A few (impressive) slides: <a href="http://incanter.org/docs/data-sorcery-new.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://incanter.org/docs/data-sorcery-new.pdf</a>
R is a very powerful tool, but I fail to see how it's adding value in this case. It seems like the author is advocating just using R to clean up the data and put it in JSON. The same can be done (without overhead for context switching and server-client architecture) in JS itself. Tools like Crossfilter [0] can be seamlessly integrated with D3.<p>[0]: <a href="https://square.github.io/crossfilter/" rel="nofollow">https://square.github.io/crossfilter/</a>
There is a seemingly dead github repo called "R2D3" by hadley wickham. Wonder what came of that project?<p><a href="https://github.com/hadley/r2d3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hadley/r2d3</a>