[R-gui] Re: [R] Feedback about SciViews?

[Luke Whitaker]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Byron Ellis wrote:

> On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, at 07:13  AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> > I think the best long term strategy is to have a clean division
> > between the user interface aspects of R (which are necessarily
> > platform dependent) and the underlying computing engine (which should
> 
> Precisely. I would actually say that R is -not- platform independent in 
> that it expects a certain type of GUI--- a shell process living on 
> STDIN and STDOUT that talks to an out-of-process Window Server of some 
> sort. Most of the work done in the Windows GUI is spent faking that 
> environment to make R think its still running on a X Server somewhere 
> and similar work was done for the Mac/Carbon port (obviously, Darwin R 
> can happily use Apple's X server). REventLoop takes some steps as does 
> the work on embedding, but its still safer to run the "GUI" stuff 
> out-of-process and even then not foolproof.

At the risk of starting a religous war, isn't java the obvious choice
for a platform independent GUI ? I know java suffered a lot from 
early over hypeing when it wasn't really ready, but in the last year
or two I've seen some very impressive platform independent GUI's
built with java.

just my tuppence worth...

Luke