[R-gui] Another R-GUI

[Philippe Grosjean]

I must probably explain a little bit, because when I talk about "complex
dialog boxes", it is not very clear what I mean. Nobody will contradict me
when I say that the dynamic dialog boxes, as described in a XML file should
be as portable as possible. In particular, it should be possible to create
similar dialog boxes using different graphical toolkits, from the same XML
specification file (Visual Basic/Delphi/VC++ for SciViews; Swing for
ObveRsive; Qt for RKward; Tcl/Tk or GTK for other projects). However, this
would limit the building blocks -the widgets- to a core basic set that is
common to all toolkits. There will certainly be some cases where the
programmer would like to use specific widgets, or exotic features. For
instance, I have some ideas on how to implement dynamically a dialog box
composed of standard widgets in Visual Basic, but it is not obvious to me
how I could dynamically add some exotic OCXes at run time! Consequently, I
suppose that a few percentage of the dialog boxes will not be portable and
will probably not benefit the dynamic implementation (they will be much
easier to build at design time and be embedded in a shared library, for
instance).

Anyway, I will submit the draft to all interested people in time.
Best,

Philippe Grosjean

P.S.: Duncan, I recently showed your RGL (R interface to OpenGL) at a
R/PASTECS formation,... and I got a lot of Aahh! and Oohhh! By the way, in
the choosen example, some particular features in the data set where only
revealed by playing with the 3D graph in RGL, but not, for instance in a
contour plot [image() followed by contour()].


-----Message d'origine-----
De : r-sig-gui-admin@stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:r-sig-gui-admin@stat.math.ethz.ch]De la part de Duncan Murdoch
Envoye : lundi 25 novembre 2002 15:26
A : Philippe Grosjean
Cc : r-sig-gui@stat.math.ethz.ch
Objet : Re: [R-gui] Another R-GUI


On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 11:20:35 +0100, you wrote in message
<MABBLJDICACNFOLGIHJOMEDGDBAA.phgrosje@ulb.ac.be>:

>Yes, Thomas, your are perfectly right: one has to establish a standard for
>describing dialog boxes. Your XML-file implementation is interesting. I
>don't think most complex dialog boxes should be constructed this way on the
>fly, but this should be useful for 95% of our needs. I am willing to add a
>page in http://www.r-project.org/GUI for proposing such a standard. Thomas,
>would you like to propose a draft? Does somebody else want to participate?

I'm also interested.

The way I see XML is as a standard way of storing hierarchical
information.  I think complex dialog boxes should normally be
constructed hierarchically, so I don't see any problem with thinking
about all of them as being made of XML.  Internally, they may
sometimes be stored differently for efficiency reasons, but there
should always be a 1-1 map to XML, so that other standard tools can be
written to work on them.

I would say what we need is some flexibility.  Sometimes dialog boxes
would be constructed in a Delphi (or Visual Basic) drag-and-drop mode;
other times a user would want to be able to say "give me a dialog box
to ask about the elements of this list".  Both should be possible.

Duncan Murdoch

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