RBloomberg vs Rblpapi

Question

I am working on a project where I am fetching bulk data from Bloomberg, such as the stock of the 1000 highest valued US companies, and then computing summary statistics on them.

I would like to use R for the procedure and I am wondering which package is would suit the task better, RBloomberg or Rblpapi.

This is what I think are the pros and cons of the packages:

RBloomberg

1. Has good Manual from 2010 and more SO questions
2. +May be more stable since it's been around for longer
3. May not work on new version of R, Requires Java
4. Will likely not receive new functions and support

Rblpapi

1. Faster, does not require Java
2. Will likely receive new functions
3. If the package is updated significantly, I may have to rewrite my code

In addition, is the functionality of the two packages equivalent?

Thank you for your input.

Answer 1

These opinion based questions are not always the best fit for Stack Overflow but this may help you:

1) This debate may be of use with Whit one of the writers of Rblpapi in 2014 saying go with Rbbg until the functionality is more developed.

2) @Dirk Eddelbuettel write-up explains the history of these packages. Dirk explains how the collaborators are linked from Dirk to Ana to John to Whit. So there is a lot of idea sharing between the two packages.

3) Only the binaries not source is available from which can be a problem for non-Windows users. (please see @GSee comments) Also packages like packrat for sandboxing do not like the lack of src files for Rbbg. (Others might comment on a workaround for this.)

Disclaimer: I do not use Rblpapi yet so I cannot judge it.