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

[Zed A. Shaw]

Philippe,

First off, yes the obveRsive woRkbench is currently using Java Swing.

Second, I believe that most of the controls you're asking for are available
in wxWindows (http://www.wxwindows.org) and that you could possibly
integrate R with wxWindows with about the same work as you are currently
doing in Windows.  The advantage though is that it would work on numerous
platforms.  The disadvantage is that wxWindows is a P-I-G!  It's huge,
requires tons of libraries, always needs a very complicated linking process
which takes me forever to get right on any platform.  Also, I found that the
docs are rather lacking, there are no GUI design tools that are worth it
(although I may fix that soon), and that it is rather poorly designed by
other standards.

An alternative is the FOX toolkit (http://www.fox-toolkit.org).  It doesn't
provide all the things that you require though.  As with wxWindows, you do
get the Scintilla editor component (http://www.scintilla.org/) which is a
pretty awesome code editor.  You could possible plug in the Gecko engine,
but RTF with graphics might be a bit much.  On the plus side, FOX is very
very well designed, extremely easy to work with, well documented, super
small, easy to use, and cross platform to at least windows and unix (and
easily ported to others).  FOX also does not come with a GUI design tool,
but I have written a little tool that generates interfaces from code
descriptions.  If you decide to work with FOX, let me know and I'll send it
to you.

Finally, I'd recommend also looking at GTK+ (http://www.gtk.org) and GTKmm
(http://gtkmm.sourceforge.net/).  GTKmm is just a C++ wrapper around GTK+.
I don't like it personally (too fat) but you may as it uses the signals/slot
design for communication and callbacks.  Very clean, but kind of annoying in
some ways.  GTK+ has all the goodies you mention, works on unix and windows
and some others (although, barely), and has a fantastic GUI design tool
called GLADE (http://glade.gnome.org/).  It's probably one of the best GUI
builders out there and has lots of nice features.  I'm pretty sure GTK+
supports all the stuff you mention, but I personally don't like the ugly
"G-Object fake OO in C" API it uses.  If you choose to do it, just use GTKmm
and C++ (unless you want to write an R to GTK+ binding, which I'm sure would
make lots of people happy :-).

Anyway, that's my .02.  There's lots of other toolkits out there, but very
few which fit your requirements.  I think you should at least take a look at
Scintilla and Gecko (http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/) for your code editor
and HTML rendering requirements.

Enjoy!
On 10/10/02 2:26 AM, "Philippe Grosjean" <philippe.grosjean@ifremer.fr>
wrote:

> 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)
> .......................................................................
> 
> 
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-- 
Zed A. Shaw