Science Gateways in the Cloud with R

A Science Gateway is a "community-development set of tools, applications, and data that is integrated via a portal or a suite of applications, usually in a graphical user interface, that is further customized to meet the needs of a specific community". The technology used for building and publishing Science Gateways has been too complex and scientists have had to rely on software developers to build and maintain those interfaces. We propose to dramatically simplify the Science Gateways production and publishing process so that it becomes accessible to data scientists without the concourse of IT professionals: We make Science Gateways R-scriptable and hence easy to create, publish and update on the fly from the R command line, their use becomes an intrinsic part of the process of programming with Data. In order to achieve this: