[R-gui] Re: R-SIG-GUI digest, Vol 1 #3 - 9 msgs

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002 16:15:37 -0700, you wrote:

>I'm a bit confused.  I thought the purpose of this mailing list was to help
>people out who are designing various graphical user interfaces (either front
>ends or widget bindings or both).  I did not realize that it was to help
>create an entire IDE in R using every toolkit imagined.

I think it's too new to have settled down to a narrow purpose yet.

>What *I* would like to really see discussed is why it is so damned hard to
>get R to work as a proper backend.  I think creating an R "server" that was
>accessible from CORBA, XML-RPC, etc. and ran R code reliably (without
>crashing every two seconds because it's not in "interactive" mode) would do
>a lot more for GUI development than anything discussed so far.

I agree.  Turning R into a reliable backend server would make it
*much* easier to experiment with different front ends.  The first
prototypes don't need to be portable, they need to be easy to develop
and play with.  Then when people on platform Y see that people on
platform X are having more fun, someone can think about how to do
things in a portable way.

Duncan Murdoch