[R] RPy

[Gad Abraham]

Doran, Harold wrote:
> I'm curious if there are users of RPy on this list. I've recently
> created a gui front end using Tkinter for some python scripts I've
> written for some of our internal operations and I am quite pleased with
> how this program works. 
> 
> I wonder if it is possible to also get this gui to run R functions
> through the use of RPy. Going even a step further, I wonder if it is
> possible to get this program to run R functions withouth even having R
> installed on the machine.
> 
> Currently, I can use py2exe to create a executable that allows for this
> gui to appear and for all python scripts to run even if the user doesn't
> have python on their machine. So (maybe) in theory if I can link Rpy to
> my gui to run R, I can then use py2exe to compile it and that would
> allow the user to run the functions even if R isn't on the machine.
> 
> I realize this is a broad question and has no minimal commented code.
> But, if anyone has some experience using Rpy, Tkinter and R I can come
> up with a small example to see if we could work out a possible way to
> use Tkinter to run R.

RPy justs translates between Python and R, it's not an implementation of 
R in Python, so you have to have R installed somewhere for it to work.

What is possible is to use a web-services approach, where the GUI sends 
requests to a web server that has Python, RPy, and R installed on it, 
gets back the results, and displays them.

-- 
Gad Abraham
Dept. CSSE and NICTA
The University of Melbourne
Parkville 3010, Victoria, Australia
email: gabraham at csse.unimelb.edu.au
web: http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~gabraham