Plotting in R from Clojure

One of R's strengths is its plotting ability. In this recipe, we'll see how to take some data and plot it on a graph. We won't really exercise R's graphic abilities, but this should be enough to get you started.

Getting ready

We must first complete the recipe, Setting up R to talk to Clojure, and have Rserve running. We must also have the Clojure-specific parts of that recipe done and the connection to Rserve made.

We'll need the ToR protocol and the implementations that we defined in the Passing vectors into R recipe.

Also, we'll need access to the java.io.File class:

(import '[java.io File])

How to do it…

This recipe will look a lot like a number of other R-related recipes. We'll create a function that assembles the string with the R expression and then we'll see it in action.

1. First, we'll define a function to initialize a PNG file for output, plot some data, and save the file, all from R:

   (defn r-plot
     ([data filename] (r-plot data filename *r-cxn*))
     ([data filename...