Nov 21, 2016

Software

New packages

• A new package crul (v0.1.0) is on CRAN. crul is a simple HTTP client, with tools for making HTTP requests, and soon will include tools for mocking HTTP requests. The package is built on R6, and takes inspiration from Ruby’s faraday gem (https://rubygems.org/gems/faraday). crul is built on top of the R curl package, an interface to libcurl. Check out the intro vignette to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new package geojson (v0.1.0) is on CRAN. geojson defines geojson classes, similar to the sp package, and aims to deal only with geojson data, without requiring any of the rgdal/rgeos stack. That means this package is light weight. We’ll continue to integrate these geojson classes with our other geospatial packages, and new packages in development. Check out the intro vignettes (https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/geojson/vignettes/geojson.html, https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/geojson/vignettes/geojson-operations.html) to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new package fauxpas (v0.1.0) is on CRAN. fauxpas provides HTTP condition helpers. Methods are included for general purpose HTTP error handling, as well as individual methods for every HTTP status code, both via status code numbers as well as their descriptive names. Supports ability to adjust behavior to stop, message or warning. Includes ability to use custom whisker template to have any configuration of status code, short description, and verbose message. Currently supports integration with crul, curl, and httr. Check out the README to get started. Repository on GitHub

Releases

• A new version (2.2) of hunspell is on CRAN. See NEWS for changes. This version includes a fix for certain compilers. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.6.0) of rcrossref is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. This version adds support for field queries, now uses rappdirs for caching, updates to docs for new pagination rules and rate limiting. Many functions now defunct: cr_search, cr_search_free, crosscite, cr_fundref. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.7.8) of elastic is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. This version adds new functions docs_update to do partial document updates and docs_bulk_prep to make bulk load format files to load data into Elasticsearch outside of R. Some bug fixes as well. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (1.2) of tesseract is on CRAN. See NEWS for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.1.6) of stplanr is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. This version adds new function od_id_order, adds some new arguments to line2route, and includes some bug fixes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (4.5.6) of plotly is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. This version adds support for timezones in scale_datetime, requires ggplot2 >2.1.0, and many other changes and bug fixes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.6.6) of rnoaa is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. This version now imports isdparser to do ISD parsing (relates to the isd() and similar functions). Improved docs, and fixed some bugs. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.1.1.1) of webchem is on CRAN. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.2.0) of rsnps is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. This version includes bug fixes for fetch_genotypes and ld_search. To make function names more consistent (lower case and snake_case), LDSearch() is now ld_search(), NCBI_snp_query() is now ncbi_snp_query(), and NCBI_snp_query2() is now ncbi_snp_query2() - but all are synonymized, so either work for now, but the uppercase versions will be defunct in the next version that hits CRAN. In addition, fixed base URLs for some of the APIs - between last release and now, many have changed to https from http. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.16.0) of git2r is on CRAN. See the release notes for changes. This version includes update to libgit2 version, and many other improvements. Repository on GitHub.

Onboarding

We accept community contributed packages via our onboarding system - a software review system, sorta like scholarly paper review, but way better. We’ll highlight new packages here that have come through this system. A huge thanks to our reviewers, who do a lot of work reviewing (see the blog post on our review system), and the authors of the packages!

There haven’t been any submissions or approved packages since last news - so please do submit your packages! At least ask questions if you’re not sure how it works, or if your package is a good fit.

If you want to be a reviewer we have a new form you can fill out, and we’ll ping you when there’s a submission that fits in your area of expertise.

Use cases

A few recent papers cite rOpenSci packages:

• Kraker et al. reference rOpenSci in their paper Open Knowledge Maps: Creating a Visual Interface to the World’s Scientific Knowledge Based on Natural Language Processing ¹
• Erdt et al. cite rAltmetric in their paper Investigating Singapore’s altmetric landscape ²
• Lane cited rOpenSci in his paper Revisiting Open Source Software Development Models for Community-Based Digital Humanities Research Generation ³

Keep up with rOpenSci news

There are a number of ways to keep up with what rOpenSci is doing:

• Mailing list: Sign up with an email address to get new blog posts sent to your inbox -> ropensci.org/#subscribe
• rOpenSci on Twitter: we’re @ropensci
• The rOpenSci blog at ropensci.org/blog - you can subscribe in any RSS aggregator, or manually via https://ropensci.org/feed.xml. We also announce new blog posts on our Twitter account.

Footnotes