[R] What happenes with R-gnome? Suggestions

[pvlad@bigfoot.com]

Hello,
not to diverge the discussion but from a newbie
prospective wxwindows is a pretty good choice for R's gui. 
 WxWindows (www.wxwindows.org),
is the ONLY gui cross-platform library that has all of the following
features:
a) does not emulate the underlying UI APIs of the operating system
   (i.e. a tab dialog on Linux will use GTK tab dialog,
    on windows it will use Microsoft's tab dialog API,
    and on Machintosh it will use theirs).  Which in my opinion,
    allows for more pleasant user experience/control of desktop
    and allows developers to integrate with already existing 
    applications on a given platform (for example, in wxwindows one can
    create an OLE automation server to be used with MS Excell)

b) On Unix/X11 you have a choice of making WxWindows to use
   either GTK or Motif (a compile time option, albeit
   GTK support is a bit more advanced then Motif)

c) Mac support is underway (it is just a bit behind the windows,
   and gtk support in terms of some APIs)

d) C++ (i.e. not interpreted or bytecompiled)
I am not sure, but I think there is an interface of wxWindows
to one of the functional programming languages (LISP), so
that can be used as a starting point for R.

e) very liberal license (like in BSD),
but has free (mailing list) and commercial support options

f) has reasonably good docs and example, but in addition to that
a book is being developed

g) support for unicode is not as developed as in Qt, but should
be usable (I have not tried it myself though).

WxWindows also have a number of utility classes for threads,
sockets, files, datastructures -- but I did not use them,
as I prefer STL and ACE. And by the way, wxWindows does not use
templates to avoid problems with older compilers (which
in my view is a drawback).

Regards,
Vladislav

On 02-Sep-2000 A.J. Rossini wrote:

[.... snip....]
> 
> On a separate tact -- GNOME is cool; it's one of the few desktops I've
> enjoyed using recently, but I'm very leery of R-GNOME.  The big issue
> really is cross-platform compatibility, and most of the decent Unix
> GUI APIs aren't easily cross-platform, sigh... (and yes, and being a
> major unix bigot, it's the painful truth).
> 
> best,
> -tony
> 
> -- 
> A.J. Rossini                          Rsrch. Asst. Prof. of Biostatistics
> BlindGlobe Networks (home/default)    rossini at blindglobe.net  
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> 
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