[R-sig-Geo] envi clone in R

[Barry Rowlingson]

Wladimir Eremeev wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
>   Research Systems (www.rsinc.com) have developed and distributes the language IDL,
>   and the GIS ENVI, written in IDL.

  I find it hard to believe they wrote it all in IDL! I'm guessing its 
probably scriptable in IDL, but underneath its written in something 
else... I could be wrong though!

>   To my oppinion, R language is superior, compared to IDL, in all aspects.
>   However, ENVI is the rather convenient and feature rich tool.

  I clicked on 'Product Documentation' on the ENVI site and it wanted me 
to log in or create a new user. To see the documentation? To find out 
what the program is about?

  Oh, what I really wanted was the Feature Tour..

>   Is anyone aware about any work, dedicated to the creation of
>   something, similar to the ENVI, but in R?

  Last year I looked at GIS-R linkages, with the added criteria of being 
open source and cross-platform. There are now a few free GIS packages 
that can do this kind of thing, with a little added glue.

  I settled on OpenEV - it has vector and raster support, its extensible 
in Python and uses Gtk for dialogs which you can customise. All I needed 
was to get Python talking to R, so I wrote some Python bindings to 
Rserve. Now I've got a GIS with a menu that drops down, you choose the 
point layers you want to work on, click 'Go', and R does some analysis 
that ends up as a raster layer back in the GIS. The user doesnt care 
that R did it.

Other GIS solutions are available!

Barry