Of course, but at that point you likely wouldn't be using any R-leaning webservers; rather, you'd start with any old web server, and then just make shell calls

Of course, but at that point you likely wouldn't be using any R-leaning webservers; rather, you'd start with any old web server, and then just make shell calls to R. Or, you _could_ do the "R as a service" type thing, and have your normal [Django] stack make a webservice call to the R-webservice.