[R] GUI's for R

[Jonathan Baron]

If you look on the R site, under "Related project" in the left
frame near the bottom, you will find a list of various attempts
at GUIs.  (It seems to be down right now, but usually it works.)

I've tried Rcmdr and Rweb.  There are others in various states of
development, some apparently not being developed.

It is my impression from reading the mailing list that many of
these are useful for what might be called canned analyses.  That
is, you want to make a data set available to lots of people
(e.g., students, co-workers) who do not know much about R and do
not want to learn, but they do want to do certain standard things
like analysis of variance, and they want some flexibility in what
variables they use, etc. etc.  But I think the level of
development is nowhere near what you would find in Splus or (what
I used to use) Systat, where you could use the GUI for a lot (but
not everything).

FWIW, I find Rweb to be very useful.  I use it with my students.
You can execute actual R commands, or even a batch file of them,
on an arbitrary data set (in the right format).  It runs in any
web browser.  Although a Google search shows that a few others
are using it, it is not being developed.  The person who wrote it
has not answered my email.  (His web page says he travels a lot.)
It is a bit limited because of its security features.  Your
sysadmin will like that, but others will want to disable them.

I think Rcmdr has great potential too, but I gave up on it
because its behavior is a bit dependent on the OS and monitor
settings, so I felt I could not be as helpful to my students
(being myself an oddball in both categories).

BUT THIS IS OPEN SOURCE.  If you like it and want to make it
better, fix it and share what you do.  I will do that with Rweb
when I get some time.  (Ha.)

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page:            http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron