[R] general question on Spotfire

[Uwe Ligges]

On 12.01.2012 17:38, Frank Harrell wrote:
> As a slight aside, Tibco/Spotfire originally planned to provide a capability
> to load R packages into S-Plus.  This always seemed to me to be a hard thing
> to do, and if my understanding is correct, this proved to be too difficult
> to do in S-Plus, at  least for large packages such as mine.

Frank,

this dates back to the times of Insightful. They already did that and 
had a module that allowed to load R packages. Of course, they had to be 
S-PLUS compatible (which is not really easy any more if package authors 
made use of R functionality that exceed the features of S-PLUS). They 
even had hired people to make some R packages S-PLUS compatible, 
R2WinBUGS was just one example that was available from their "CSAN" 
repositories. (Nowadays R2WInBUGS is no longer S-PLUS compatible, since 
the authors do not care too much and do not have S-PLUS licenses to 
check it.)

Best,
Uwe







> Frank
>
> Terry Therneau-2 wrote
>>
>> John,
>>    Spotfire is a menu driven data exploration tool, very popular here
>> with biologists who found that their previous Excel based approach
>> doesn't cut it for large data sets.  When TIBCO wanted to expand the
>> tool with further quantitative features they made (I think) a bright
>> decision to purchase S-plus and integrate it as a back end, rather than
>> try to write dozens of new modules in house.  The "Splus vs R" aspect of
>> the list responses misses the main point, however.
>>
>> Spotfire is designed to let you nose around in a data set, quickly
>> plotting various aspects, zoom in on subsets (imagine a mouse based
>> version of the "pinch" metafor used on the iphone), etc.  It is a useful
>> and very well designed tool; one demo was enough to make the sale and
>> early growth here was explosive.  But if you already know R you can do
>> those graphs already, albeit quite a bit slower.  I decided not to
>> persue proficiency in Spotfire, but that was partly because it's Windows
>> based and I prefer Unix.  Also most of my work is at the
>> post-exploration phase, and I would have flipped back to straight R for
>> that anyway.
>>
>> Terry Therneau
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help@ mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>
> -----
> Frank Harrell
> Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University
> --
> View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/general-question-on-Spotfire-tp4285758p4289575.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.