I’ve been thinking about the"mixed workflow" approach that I demo’d with Shiny app. The main purpose developing the mixed workflow approach, I think, is is to enable collaboration between someone in a word processing / spreadsheet environment with someone in a text/R/git environment. Both can use their preferred approach, and you get a final product that’s a scientific paper or interactive web page.
There are a bunch of things one could do to improve this. One is to use the the driver and git2r packages to import the version history of a Google Doc into working git repository. Another is to improve the Shiny App, possibly using htmlwidgets so that text imported into the final product live, and/or embedding a google doc directly into the Shiny App, so that both editing and output can be seen in one place.
My question is: Is it worth it to develop this over alternatives? For instance, if there were an app that allowed live, concurrent *.Rmd editing on the left and displayed compile HTML on the right, would that be a better collaboration environment for most cases? What about live co-editing in RStudio server? And of course @Louis’s idea of using the Google Doc as R Markdown and syncing to a local file.
In what cases would the “mixed workflow” / ArchieML approach have an advantage? Right now I think the advantage is in (1) more complex outputs than *.Rmd documents, like Shiny apps and web pages with complex layouts, and (2) in version control, because I think version control in Google Docs/Dropbox and git have distinct advantages (ease/power), that can be combined with this approach.
Thoughts?