"R" in Action - integrated with other applications

From your intro, R appears to run in its own shell, much like Matlab (or tk/tcl). I'm interested in applying this to a web environment.
Are there ways to access R directly from other programs, eg Java?
Or, would I need to set up a R server (alluded to in a previous post)?
Does you book address or touch upon either of these situations?

-Fred

Hi Fred,

There are quite a number of R-Web interfaces. They are described in the R FAQ. You should see solutions using CGI, Java, Javascript, and PHP. Others exist.

There are also numerous solutions for accessing R from within another language. For example, you can access R functionality from within Java using rJava or rCaller. Python users can use rpy.

I don't cover this topic in the book. The book primarily focuses on using base R and user-contributed R packages to analyze data and create graphs.