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

[Philippe Grosjean]

Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk> writes:

>...
>Mine too, obviously, although maybe for other reasons: I think it is
>important to have the GUI scriptable in R, and the Tcl/Tk model is the
>best tested one out there, and cross-platform except for some
>low-level issues.

>I do occasionally have doubts, though. Sometimes the Gtk approach and
>all its promises about integration with other tools looks attractive,
>but I still think we need the internal scriptability. Some efforts in
>that direction are gnocl (Tcl interface in the style of Tk) and stklos
>(object-oriented Scheme interface). However, both of these are in
>their infancy, and essentially one-man jobs.
>...

Interesting enough, the opposite option (R driven by the GUI) is not
completely stupid. This is the option I take in SciViews. Indeed, I have an
object-oriented abstraction layer to communicate with the R calculation
kernel. This layer is called "a plug". Interface exposed by the plug is
abstracted enough to apply to other calculation engines (Splus, Matlab,
Mathematica, Octave, Scilab,...), and also to other client-server tasks,
even to the communication with external scientific devices or with
databases. Methods are typically 'connect', 'evaluate', 'interrupt',
'disconnect',... Writing plugs like that with one-to-one synchrone
communication is not difficult. However, I need asynchrone communication,
simultaneous connection of one client to several different kernels,
simultaneous connection of several clients to the same kernel, error
detection and recovery (being able to detect and kill a locked calculation
kernel without affecting the other connections). This takes me lot of time
and trials/errors, and the whole SciViews project is much delayed (it is
also currently a one-man project). However, I will manage to get something
operational by DSC 2003.

Obviously, the SciViews approach takes much computing resources: it is not a
lightweight solution that reserves most of computation power to the
calculations, but it is very flexible and gives the opportunity to work
easily and almost seemlessly with several different calculation engines from
within the same GUI.

I believe that both approaches (lightweight GUI driven by R and generic GUI
driving possibly various different calculation kernels) should be developped
concurrently since they have different and complementary uses.

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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