Integrating R and Java

Published by Alexander Bertram on 2019-08-16.

Do you want to use R and Java together? Renjin makes it very easy to integrate R and Java in three quick steps:

First, add Renjin as a dependency to your Maven project:

    <dependencies>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.renjin</groupId>
        <artifactId>renjin-script-engine</artifactId>
        <version>3.5-beta65</version>
      </dependency>
    </dependencies>

For this to work you will also need to add BeDataDriven’s public repository to your pom.xml:

    <repositories>
      <repository>
        <id>bedatadriven</id>
        <name>bedatadriven public repo</name>
        <url>https://nexus.bedatadriven.com/content/groups/public/</url>
      </repository>
    </repositories>

If you're not using Maven, you can find comparable instructions for all major JVM-based build tools in our Project Setup Guide

Once you have the dependency added, you can create a new RenjinScriptEngine:

    import javax.script.*;
    import org.renjin.script.*;

    // ... add additional imports here ...

    public class TryRenjin {
      public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        // create a script engine manager:
        RenjinScriptEngineFactory factory = new RenjinScriptEngineFactory();

        // create a Renjin engine:
        ScriptEngine engine = factory.getScriptEngine();

        engine.eval("df <- data.frame(x=1:10, y=(1:10)+rnorm(n=10))");
        engine.eval("print(df)");
        engine.eval("print(lm(y ~ x, df))");
      }
    }

That's it! You're now calling R from Java.

Visit our documentation for more details and advanced use cases.

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