webchem
Adding chemical databases with one hand while public ones close programmatic access with the other.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of admiralonco and GSODR — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
The oncology ADaM helper is dissolving into admiral core, one deprecation at a time.
admiralonco is the oncology companion to admiral, and it ships response-criteria recipes rather than code: RECIST, iRECIST, IMWG, GCIG and PCWG3 each arrive as a vignette plus an ADaM template. Cadence is one or two releases a year, each adding a criteria vignette. The 1.4.0 release began deprecating most of the package's own exported functions in favour of generic admiral equivalents.
A weather-station data client that broke one return type to hand back distances instead of bare IDs.
GSODR fetches and tidies NOAA Global Surface Summary of the Day weather data for R. The 4.0.0 release made nearest_stations() return a data.table of full station metadata plus distance in kilometres rather than a character vector of station IDs, with a documented one-liner for anyone who only wanted the IDs. Nothing has shipped since March 2024.
admiralonco is the oncology companion to admiral, and it ships response-criteria recipes rather than code: RECIST, iRECIST, IMWG, GCIG and PCWG3 each arrive as a vignette plus an ADaM template. Cadence is one or two releases a year, each adding a criteria vignette. The 1.4.0 release began deprecating most of the package's own exported functions in favour of generic admiral equivalents.
The package is converging on a documentation-and-templates model: reusable derivation logic moves upstream into admiral, and admiralonco keeps only the oncology-specific know-how. Every release since 1.0.0 has added a criteria vignette rather than new exported functions, and 1.4.1 extends that by making the template set browsable from the Get Started menu. The surface users program against is shrinking while the guidance they read is growing.
Expect the deprecation cycle started in 1.4.0 to advance through its warning and error phases across the next one or two releases, with new work arriving as another response-criteria vignette rather than new functions.
GSODR fetches and tidies NOAA Global Surface Summary of the Day weather data for R. The 4.0.0 release made nearest_stations() return a data.table of full station metadata plus distance in kilometres rather than a character vector of station IDs, with a documented one-liner for anyone who only wanted the IDs. Nothing has shipped since March 2024.
The package is mature and its releases read as upkeep: refreshing the internal ISD history database, dropping dependencies in favour of base and curl, and hardening the download path against station-year combinations that do not exist. The 4.0.0 change fits the same pattern of returning more structure by default rather than making callers query twice.
The most likely next release is another internal station-history refresh; there is no signal of new data sources or analysis features in these entries.
Other Analytics products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either admiralonco or GSODR.
Adding chemical databases with one hand while public ones close programmatic access with the other.
The spatiotemporal companion to sf, moving at the pace of the packages around it.
An interface to Europe's long-term ecosystem research network that went quiet after 2.0.
Spatial model assessment that spent the last year on cross-platform arithmetic and CRAN rules.
Stopped trusting the cloud to prepare its taxonomic databases and does the conversion locally.
Went from estimating felling dates to doing the crossdating that produces them.
See all admiralonco alternatives → · See all GSODR alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. admiralonco and GSODR are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. admiralonco and GSODR are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
Top admiralonco alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "admiralonco alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/admiralonco for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top GSODR alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "GSODR alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/gsodr for the full list with editorial commentary on each.