grpc

Work In Progress

Background

gRPC is a description format and library for services built on top of Protobuf. I wrote an R wrapper to the core C library in 2017, but it is lacking several key features:

• Authentication - be able to provide / accept authentication tokens
• Security - use TLS to encrypt messages
• Streaming - reuse an existing connection for multiple requests

Let me know what you think.

Related work

http://github.com/nfultz/grpc is a basic implementation.

https://github.com/eddelbuettel/rprotobuf - Protobuf for R

https://github.com/grpc/grpc - underlying C library

Details of your coding project

The student will add or extend the functions in the grpc package from both R and the underlying C code.

Expected impact

Allows R to interoperate with other gRPC projects. Apache Arrow is one, as are many Google ML products. gRPC is also used pretty widely in industry.

Mentors

MENTORS: fill in this part. each project needs 2 mentors. One should be an expert R programmer with previous package development experience, and the other can be a domain expert in some other field or application area (optimization, bioinformatics, machine learning, data viz, etc). Ideally one of the two mentors should have previous experience with GSOC (either as a student or mentor). Please provide contact info for each mentor, along with qualifications.

IMPORTANT: you MUST write "EVALUATING" for one mentor, who will be required to do the three evaluations of the student during the summer. In previous years we have had issues with mentors who do not fill in evaluations, and when this happens R project is penalized (money is taken away), although students are not penalized (students are passed by default if no mentor eval is submitted). Therefore one mentor must take responsibility for doing the evaluations, and you must indicate that here, and your student must indicate that as well in the application. If it is not clear which mentor will be the EVALUATING mentor then your project will not be accepted. Example:

• EVALUATING MENTOR: Neal Fultz [email protected] is the author of R packages grpc and stackoverflow. He is the data science lead at UCLA Social Science Computing and the principal of NJNM consulting, and coorganizer of the Los Angeles R User Group from 2010-2014.

• SECOND MENTOR - TBD

Tests

TODO!

Students, please do one or more of the following tests before contacting the mentors above.

MENTORS: write several tests that potential students can do to demonstrate their capabilities for this particular project. Ask some hard questions that will give you insight about how the students write code to solve problems. You'll see that the harder the questions that you ask, the easier it will be for you to choose between the students that apply for your project! Please modify the suggestions below to make them specific for your project.

• Easy: something that any useR should be able to do, e.g. download some existing package listed in the Related Work, and run it on some example data.
• Medium: something a bit more complicated. You can encourage students to write a script or some functions that show their R coding abilities.
• Hard: Can the student write a package with Rd files, tests, and vignettes? If your package interfaces with non-R code, can the student write in that other language?

Solutions of tests

Students, please post a link to your test results here.

• EXAMPLE STUDENT 1 NAME, LINK TO GITHUB PROFILE, LINK TO TEST RESULTS.