The promises package brings asynchronous programming capabilities to R. Asynchronous programming is a technique used by many programming languages to increase scalability and responsiveness. Traditionally, this style of programming has not been useful to R users. But the advent of R web applications like Shiny has made async programming relevant.
This website provides a multi-step guide that will help familiarize you with several related concepts that are required for effective async programming. It is highly recommended that you go through the topics in order.
You can install both the promises package and an async-compatible version of Shiny (requires v1.1+) just by installing Shiny from CRAN:
install.packages("shiny")There are also some supporting packages that have experimental async-compatible branches:
devtools::install_github("ramnathv/htmlwidgets")
devtools::install_github("ropensci/plotly@async")
devtools::install_github("rstudio/DT")promises?
Why do we need async programming? What is it good for, and not good for?
Async programming can require a serious mental shift, even for veteran programmers. This document attempts to introduce the “average” R user to the topic, as gently as possible.
promises
A more thorough exploration of the concepts behind promises, and the API provided by the promises package.
A guide to the future package, the place where we expect most async programming in R to begin.
future and promises usage
Leverage promises to make sure that future execution does not block the main R process.
Learn how to integrate promises into your Shiny applications.
promises
Functions and techniques for working with multiple promises simultaneously.
Walk through the conversion of a realistic Shiny example app to async.