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

[Barry Rowlingson]

Luke Whitaker wrote:

> 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.

  As long as it doesn't end up like Matlab's java gui. Last summer 
vacation our systems guys upgraded matlab to the latest version with the 
new gui. On the first day of term in September, 25 students sat down to 
a lab session, typed 'matlab' and the very hefty Sun machine to which 
they (and many other people round campus) were connected fell rapidly to 
its knees.

  I suggested to the systems guys that they hard-code the '-nojvm' 
option into the startup script, the other option being to tattoo the 
same option onto every matlab user's knuckles. I think they liked the 
latter, and offered to provide rusty needles.

  Yes, java GUIs are a great idea with the platform independence and the 
swing toolkit configurability (it looks like Windows! no, its Motif! no 
its CDE! a new skin every day) but on a multi-user machine its very easy 
to kill it.

  There are other cross-platform UI toolkits around that dont use Java. 
FLTK springs to mind: http://www.fltk.org/

> just my tuppence worth...

  I've probably thrown in halfpence.

Baz