[Bioc-devel] New package: widgetInvoke

[James Wettenhall]

Hi Jeff,

That sounds like a great idea!  Philippe Grosjean and I have  
recently been discussing similar ideas (in the general context 
of R-GUIs, not Bioconductor-specific).  I have been playing with 
an R-interface to the wxPython GUI toolkit which uses 
GTk on Linux and uses the native MSWindows GUI widgets on Windows.  
http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/folders/james/wxPython/
So far, R-wxPython only works on Windows, but I am working hard 
to enable it to work under Linux, and feel like I am getting 
very close! If you like, you can monitor the discussion on the 
wxPython-users mailing list.  (See subject lines like 
"Embed wxPython, PyExc_IOError symbol not found" and
"Embed wxPython, PyExec_IOError symbol not found".)

I haven't had a chance to look at your package yet, so I 
apologize if the comments below make any false assumptions.

Can I make one suggestion, that in order to benefit from the 
experience of the R-SIG-GUI mailing list community and get the 
non-Bioconductor people to become interested enough to play with 
your new R-GUI technology and provide valuable feedback, they 
would be more interested if the package didn't depend on any 
Bioconductor packages like Biobase and reposTools.  Or if this 
is impossible, then you could at least clarify to the R-SIG-GUI 
mailing list that it is not necessary to download the entire 
Bioconductor repository with getBioC(), just to try out this 
new R-GUI technology.  Maybe reposTools etc. will eventually 
become part of CRAN or R-base, then I won't be so concerned 
about the accessibility of this R-GUI technology to 
non-Bioconductor people.

Regards,
James