[Rd] Building an R GUI using gWidgets and RGtk2

[Gerlanc, Daniel]

Hello,

I'm developing a GUI in R that will be used to monitor financial
portfolio performance.  The GUI will be distributed as an R package.  So
far, I've decided to use the "cairoDevice", "RGtk2", "gWidgets", and
"gWidgetsRGtk2" packages to develop the GUI.  I am trying to decide what
would be the best way to structure the GUI would be.

I've considered 3 approaches to building the GUI.  The first would be to
use S4 classes.  I would create parent "gui" object that would store
widgets or containers in slots.  Other more specialized guis for
different purposes would extend this parent "gui" object.  The
difficulty in this approach is R's use of pass-by-value.  Once the gui
object has been created, changing any of the slots of the gui requires
returning a new GUI object or saving one off in a higher level
environment and editing the slots directly.  Editing the slots directly
would completely bypass the S4 method dispatch.

Another approach would be more functional.  I would create variables
that are global within the package or in their own environment and
define the package function closures within this environment.  This
could work, but the code could get noisy when calls to have be made to
distinguish between local variable assignment within the environment of
the functions and assignment within the namespace of the package.

The third approach I've been considering is using the R.oo package.  I
have never used this package before but it appears to provide similar OO
features to Java.  Because it allows references, it would seem to
provide the features I'm looking for from both the S4 and functional
approaches.

Any comments or suggestions on these different approaches would be
appreciated.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Daniel Gerlanc