Stata for Internet applications: a web interface for Stata user-written commands

The integration of Stata with web applications can be of great use in some contexts. One such scenario is to make user-written Stata commands available directly through a webpage from any web-enabled device, such as a smartphone, tablet computer, personal digital assistant (PDA) or any personal computer with a web browser. This would allow reaching a large and diverse audience. Another scenario is the integration of subroutines written in Stata or Mata in web applications, which is desirable in organizations where statistical applications are developed by one team with Stata, while the rest of the business logic and front-end applications are developed by another team using different technologies. If Stata programs can be used directly, the often costly translation from Stata into other programming languages can be avoided, thus saving development resources, time and eliminating the errors and discrepancies due to translation mistakes and limitations of target languages. We demonstrate an approach for executing user-written commands on Stata IC, Stata SE and Stata MP through a web application based on the WAMP stack (Microsoft Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Then, we introduce the adjustments needed for other operating systems, web servers and server-side scripting programming languages. We describe the requirements for Stata user-written commands accessible through web applications, their limitations, the bidirectional communication between Stata and generic web applications, possible solutions for concurrent execution scenarios, as well as the transformation of Stata dialog box (.dlg) files into web-ready HTML / CSS / JavaScript interfaces. Finally, we mention web application security principles, Stata-based web services and software licensing approaches.