[R-gui] Current R-GUI projects & best graphical toolkits

[Philippe Grosjean]

Hi,

Thank you for those who sended me infos about ongoing R GUI projects.
I have:
- CoCoA R GUI: Jan De Leeuw
- obveRsive woRkbench: Dan Putler & Zed Shaw
- SPSS-style GUI (planed?): Kurt Hornik
- SciViews: Philippe Grosjean

Are there any other ones?

For the graphical toolkit, it is certainly time to get a clearer idea of
which one is the most suitable among Tcl/Tk (+ Tix), Gtk, QT, wxWindows,...
As far as I know, Peter Dalgaard (with many others) develops Tcl/tk; Duncan
Temple Lang works on Gtk/Gnome. There are already available libraries
(including the base R library 'tcltk'). Dan Putler and Zed Shaw recently
choose Swing. Is this correct? Any suggestions from specialists are welcome.

Personnally, I develop SciViews under Windows, using OCXes (most are free or
shipped with Microsoft Visual Studio, but one is commercial -ActiveBar-).
This is not portable at all. This is not open source at all. But I choose it
for all the functionnalities I got (and indeed, I started the project many
years ago, when many oher graphical toolkits like Gtk or Qt were in their
infancy). I consider the current windows implementation of SciViews as a
prototype to test various GUI architectures. I would definitely be happy to
get rid of all these M$ D-Com, ActiveX and OCXes, but I need:
- An advanced text editor with synthax highlighting, "codetips",
"auto-completion lists", etc... and I got the free CodeMax with CodeSense
(http://www.ticz.com/homes/users/nlewis/HTML/Software_Development/CodeSense/
Download/download.htm#uguide) which is wonderful.
- An integrated and context-sensitive menus/toolbars/docking windows
system,... and I found ActiveBar
(http://www.datadynamics.com/activebar/default.htm) very easy to use and
configure.
- A spreadsheet,... and I got Formula One (shipped with the free version of
Borland Delphi) which is very nice.
- A decent rich text editor with embedded graphs, etc... and I find the
standard richedit.ocx suitable.
- A html browser,... and the Internet Explorer ocx is performing well
(arrghl).

Yes, I know! You want to kill me now! Perhaps, an alternative would be to
convince me that I will find similar features in other graphical toolkits?

Best,

Philippe Grosjean

...........]<(({°<...............<°}))><...............................
( ( ( ( (
 ) ) ) ) )      Philippe Grosjean
( ( ( ( (
 ) ) ) ) )      IFREMER Nantes - DEL/AO
( ( ( ( (       rue de l'Ile d'Yeu, BP 21105, 44311 Nantes Cedex 3
 ) ) ) ) )      tel: (33) 02.40.37.42.29, fax: (33) 02.40.37.42.41
( ( ( ( ( 
 ) ) ) ) )      SciViews project coordinator (http://www.sciviews.org)
( ( ( ( (       e-mail: phgrosjean@sciviews.org
 ) ) ) ) ) 
( ( ( ( (       "I'm 100% confident that p is between 0 and 1"
 ) ) ) ) )                                L. Gonick & W. Smith (1993)
.......................................................................