I'm new to R and I decided to put R on a machine I have and see if I can remotely run code that is on my desktop computer.
While searching for "how to do" that, I came across the names "Rserve" and "RStudio". As far as I could tell, RServe is a package (actually, it seems to be the package) which I can use to configure the server, while RStudio is an IDE.
My question is: does RStudio use RServe "under the hood"? And, if it doesn't, then how does RStudio compare to RServe? (I.e., which one is better and why?)
[I figured out that this question could possibly be a duplicate, but I couldn't find any similar question]
Rserve is a client server implemenation written in pure c that starts a server and spawns multiple processes each with it's own R workspace. This is not threads but processes due to R's limitation on multithreading. It uses a QAP packing protocol as it's primary form of transport between the client and the server. You execute commands via the client (PHP, Java, C++) to the server and it returns you REXP objects that are essentially mappings to R's underlying SEXP data objects. Rserve also offers a websockets version that does will can transmit data through websockets but the api is not well documented. It also supports basic authentication through a configuration file.
Rstudio is a C++ and gwt application that provides a web based front end to R. AFAIK it uses json as it's primary transport and supports authentication through pam. Each user has a workspace configured in their home directory. It runs a server very similar but not the same as Rserve to communicate with R using RCPP. It also has it's own plotting driver used to wrap the plot device so that it can pickup the plots to be served to the ui. It has much more functionality such as stepping through your code from the ui and viewing workspace variables.
Functionally they are similar in that they provide a client/server connection to R but IMHO the comparison stops there.