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

[Don MacQueen]

At 5:29 PM +0100 4/30/03, Luke Whitaker wrote:
>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.

Not unless it's a whole lot better than Insightful's initial effort on Solaris.

The GUI itself (i.e., how it operated, what menus were where, etc.) 
was fine, but it was completely useless for anyone sitting at a 
remote host, due to dreadful image quality and poor performance when 
displaying anywhere other than on the console of the machine on which 
SPlus was actually running.

(maybe it was ok displayed on a remote host of the same architecture; 
I don't remember; but neither I nor any of the potential additional 
users was)

-Don

>just my tuppence worth...
>
>Luke
>
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-- 
--------------------------------------
Don MacQueen
Environmental Protection Department
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA, USA