[R] GUI's for R

[Philippe Grosjean]

Johnathan Baron wrote:
>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.)

Uhh! I am the maintainer of the GUI section of the R site. If you cannot
access the site, please, send me an email... I have to fix it! I just try
right now (05/12/2003 18:16 French time), and I can access the site without
any problem.

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

Yes, the original idea of this section, together with the R-SIG-GUI mailing
list, which is not very active since its beginning, is to support the
development of GUIs on top of R. My politic is not to favor any project, but
to collect together in a single place differents "attempts" (let's call it
like that, without any pejorative view), to build GUIs. Consequently, there
are several projects, at different levels of achievement, and maintenance,
yes. Some are idle now, yes. I keep a link to them in order to give them a
second chance...

>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).

Personnally, I am envolved in SciViews. I made some progress towards a more
complete GUI, but not as fast as I would like, because we are only three,
part-time programmers on this project, currently. Also, I had very little
time to save for SciViews this year. Furthermore, a big problem is: it is
not platform-independent and it is mainly written in Visual Basic.

I suppose other projects face similar problems. That is probably why they do
not progress very rapidly. In a word: many people waiting and impatient, but
very few volonteers to actually make things work. This is not a critic, this
is just a constatation.

As a consequence, the less ambitious the project, and the more chances it
has to complete, like R-Commander that is clearly focused on canned analyses
aiming students in statistic. I think this project was developped by no more
than two people in an incredibly short amount of time. Kudos! But yes, it is
still canned analyses.

So, what next? Well, I can only speak for myself. I just got a position this
week as Professor in biostatistics. This means I will have more time (and
needs!) to develop a GUI for my students and colleagues (I don't need it for
myself). I am also developing some original ideas with Eric Lecoutre
(maintainer of the R2HTML library) that we intend to present to the UseR!
workshop in Vienna next May... However, I loose a lot of time trying to make
things platform-independent, while I have now what begin to be a good
starting basis, but for Windows only: SciViews.

Conclusion: either participate(if you want to further develop RWeb, good
idea), or be patient because it moves... but verrrry slowly.

Best,

Philippe Grosjean

...........]<(({?<...............<?}))><...............................
 ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (   Prof. Philippe Grosjean
 ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (   Numerical Ecology Laboratory
 ) ) ) ) )  Mons-Hainaut University
( ( ( ( (   8, Av. du Champ de Mars, 7000 Mons, Belgium
 ) ) ) ) )
( ( ( ( (   phone: 00-32-65.37.34.97
 ) ) ) ) )  email: Philippe.Grosjean at umh.ac.be; phgrosjean at sciviews.org
( ( ( ( (   SciViews project coordinator (http://www.sciviews.org)
 ) ) ) ) )
.......................................................................