RDesk: Native Desktop App Framework for 'R'

Build native Windows desktop applications using 'R' and 'WebView2'. Provides a robust 'R6'-based event loop, asynchronous background task management via 'mirai' and 'callr', and a native 'Win32' message bridge for seamless 'R'-to-user-interface communication without listening ports or network overhead. Allows 'R' developers to create professional, standalone desktop tools with modern web-based user interfaces while maintaining a pure 'R' backend.

Version: 1.0.4
Imports: R6, jsonlite, digest, processx, callr, mirai (≥ 1.0.0), base64enc, zip, stats, utils, parallel
Suggests: testthat (≥ 3.0.0), withr, fs, knitr, rmarkdown, devtools, renv, broom, ggplot2, dplyr, rstudioapi, pkgdown
OS_type: windows
Published: 2026-03-31
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.RDesk (may not be active yet)
Author: Janakiraman G ORCID iD [aut, cre], Serge Zaitsev [cph] (Author of webview library (src/webview/webview.h)), Niels Lohmann [cph] (Author of nlohmann/json (inst/include/nlohmann/json.hpp)), Microsoft Corporation [cph] (WebView2 SDK (src/webview2_sdk/))
Maintainer: Janakiraman G <janakiraman.bt at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/Janakiraman-311/RDesk/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
Copyright: see file COPYRIGHTS
URL: https://github.com/Janakiraman-311/RDesk, https://janakiraman-311.github.io/RDesk/
NeedsCompilation: yes
SystemRequirements: Windows 10 or later, 'Rtools44' or later (https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/), Microsoft 'WebView2' Runtime (https://developer.microsoft.com/microsoft-edge/webview2/)
Language: en-US
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: RDesk results

Documentation:

Reference manual: RDesk.html , RDesk.pdf
Vignettes: Architecture (source, R code)
Async & Background Tasks in RDesk (source, R code)
Cookbook (source, R code)
Getting Started with RDesk (source, R code)
RDesk IPC Message Contract (source, R code)
Coming from Shiny (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: RDesk_1.0.4.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

Linking:

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