JavaRDS

Create R-style RDS data from Java

This implements a simple writer for R's RDS data file format in a Java API.

The API here doesn't implement GZip compression, but that could be added if necessary. It can also be achieved by adding a suitable compression layer to the output methods' OutputStream argument.

In the future, it might be desirable to write an RDS reader too, but that's not implemented yet.

I was motivated to write this code in order to support creating archive.rds files in the Sonatype Nexus R Repository Plugin (see sonatype-nexus-community/nexus-repository-r#21), so it only really supports enough of R's data types for that. More types could be added in the future if that would be useful.

Building & releasing

In general I'm following the instructions at http://www.albertgao.xyz/2018/01/18/how-to-publish-artifact-to-maven-central-via-gradle/ .

One-time setup

1. I signed up for an account on https://issues.sonatype.org/, with the username kenahoo.

2. I applied for the com.nexteraanalytics namespace (https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/OSSRH-47984)

   1. As part of this ticket, we had to prove we own the nexteraanalytics.com domain name, which we did by adding a custom TXT entry to the DNS record.

3. I created a GPG key for signing releases (actually I already had one, so I just imported it), its id is B7EF9476.

4. I created a gradle.properties file with my info:

   nexusUsername=kenahoo
   nexusPassword=MY_SONATYPE_USER_PASSWORD
   signing.keyId=B7EF9476
   signing.password=MY_GPG_KEY_PASSWORD
   

5. I commented out the nexusUsername and nexusPassword entries in ~/.gradle/gradle.properties, because annoyingly, they have higher precedence than the ones in the local file.

Making a release

1. I executed gradle uploadArchives, it completed without errors. It uploaded several (8?) artifacts to https://oss.sonatype.org/service/local/staging/deploy/maven2/ .

2. At https://oss.sonatype.org/#stagingRepositories, I found the comnexteraanalytics-1000 repository and hit the "Close" button on it.

3. After closing the repo, I waited a few minutes for the "Release" button to be active, then I clicked it.

The releases can be found at e.g. https://search.maven.org/search?q=a:JavaRDS .