[Rd] Project suggestion: Interface between R and graphic devices

[Knut Krueger]

Philippe Grosjean schrieb:

>
> This is not true. Version 0.8-8 of SciViews-R 
> (http://www.sciviews.org/SciViews-R) is compatible with R 2.1.1. There 
> were several months of delay between R 2.1.X and the compatible 
> SciViews-R version... There were a lot of changes required in my code, 
> because of the internationalization of R. I though translating R in 
> French was a priority, so, I have been working on "R French" first. 
> Also, I took a little time with my baby that was born in April... life 
> is not limited to programming R!

Congratulations I know the time when my boy was born.

>
> Remember that Open Source is a collaborative and voluntary approach of 
> developing software. 


Please don't misunderstand my question.
We developed a couple of (commercial) programs for medical university use.
On  of the required things were compatible interfaces between different 
hardware and software parts.
for example:
There was a definition of a function call:

function (Var1, Var2, ....., Version)
begin

case version of
version1:  ...
version2  ...

end {case}
end {function}

This functions and procedures did the communication between different 
versions of hard an software.

And the open source community is the best development environment to 
develop and take care for such API.
So back to my suggestion.
You told me that you must do a lot of changes in your GUI. If there 
would be one API which is serving a couple of old R Versions, then all 
running systems of GUIs would be running even the code for the latest 
R-version is changed. And only one part of the code must be changed not 
all available GUIs.


> If you want to use all the time the latest R version, just learn to 
> use its standard command line interface. 

Some of the user want to use the newest command line interface some of 
(the newbies) want to use GUIs

> If you prefer SciViews, JGR, R Commander, etc., then you should expect 
> some delay before R releases and compatible GUI releases. Indeed, one 
> must say that R Commander has always been released on time with the 
> latest R version, as fart as I know, and JGR is very close to. 

and this is the point that I thought maybe there could be some 
improvement with an universal API for GUIs

> Latest SciViews version was very, very late. I apologize for that. 

Please don't think that this was my intention  - it was just the other 
side. I realized that there was a long time especially for your nice GUI 
and I thought:
It seems to be wasted time if Mr Grosjean must always do such a lot work 
after there is a new version of R. And therefor I tough about something 
to do for the R-Community.

But dear community please see this suggestion in a manner that I do not 
have any knowledge about the work of the core team but that I am 
fascinated about the work, but that I am not able to win user for R 
because of problems with missing or not working GUIs.

Missing:
I do not know whether you know Wordperfect Office. They want the user to 
change from MS-Office.
They build in a function: Switch to Word Mode, or switch to Powerpoint 
Mode. and this is the point to get Statistica user and SPSS user away 
from their programs.

medium universities in Germany have between 500 and 1000 licences for 
SPSS. What a lot of money which is not available for the researchers

Conclusion.
I did not want a just ready solution, but I thought about some steps for 
the next years.
There is an API available if I understand Prof. Ripley right, but then I 
do not understand the problems of the GUI developer.

And please again I do not want to blame anybody of any development team 
I want to understand the project.



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