Adobe Flash is a technology for embedding animations (and even applications) into Web pages. On the Keep on Fighting! blog, Yihui Xie has a couple of neat examples of integrating R with Flash.
The first example is creating a tag cloud: a visualization of the frequency of words in a body of text. You can create a static tag cloud in R with the pointLabel function in the maptools package, but you can make it, er, flashier with Flash. Yihui shows how to use the JavaScript interface in R to pass tag data to a "tagcloud" Flash object, which displays the tags in animated glory. Unfortunately I can't embed it here, so be sure to check out the page to see it in action.
Another cool (or rather, hot) example is simulating fire in R and then visualizing it as a Flash animation. The frames of the simulated fire were generated using the image function in R, and then converted into Flash with the saveSWF function from the animation package.
This is a great way of visualizing all sorts of analyses, and distributing the results via a Web page. All the code you need for both these examples is provided in the linked pages.
Keep on Fighting: Simulation of Burning Fire in R
I have found Flash to be very useful for sharing static graphics as well on the web in a nice raster-free way. It's nice to be able to show resolution-free plots in a web browser without needing a pdf or postscript reader. I use swftools to convert my R-generated pdf files to swf.
Posted by: Ryan | June 15, 2009 at 06:12
@Ryan: I prefer PDF output too, but in the above fire simulation, it's almost impossible for SWF Tools to generate Flash animation from PDF files, because the image() will generate too many shapes in PDF, which SWF Tools cannot afford (65536 shapes at most).
Posted by: Yihui | June 15, 2009 at 20:30
waaaoooooo that's great simulation
Posted by: juan david | September 16, 2011 at 16:13