[R-gui] Re: [R] Feedback about SciViews?

[Philippe Grosjean]

>>>>> "PhGr" == Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org>
>>>>>     on Tue, 29 Apr 2003 09:56:22 +0200 writes:

    PhGr> Hello, This message is little off-topic in
    PhGr> R-help. Sorry for that, but not all interested people
    PhGr> are wired yet to r-sig-gui
    PhGr> (http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-gui). Thanks
    PhGr> for your comprehension.

    PhGr> A preview version of SciViews
    PhGr> (a Graphical User Interface for R under Windows,
					    =============

    PhGr> http://www.sciviews.org)  was released a few weeks ago.

Martin Maechler answered:

>R for Windows already comes with a (simple) GUI.
>Many of the R developers would rather think mostly about GUI
>efforts that are platform INDEPENDENT, such as the standard Tcl/Tk
>package (try "library(tcltk)" and the demos from "demo(package =
>"tcltk")" in R), and the RGtk (http://www.omegahat.org/RGtk/) one.

>For that reason, in the Bioconductor project (http://www.bioconductor.org),
>the  "tkWidgets" package has been developed (built on top of R's
>standard "tcltk" package -- which from 1.7.0 on does not need
>extra efforts for installation on Windows).

>Excuse that this sounds a bit negative, but platform independence
>is one of the strengths of R.

No problem, I am aware of this. I place platform independence high in the
wish list. However, do not condamn SciViews just because it does not match
this constraint, or because it does not use tools provided by the R Core
Team. Believe me, if I would be able to develop SciViews today with RAD
tools using platform independent toolkits, I would do so! Remember that the
current implementation is rather a prototype for testing various concepts. I
believe that early testing of concepts is very important in order to design
an efficient GUI for R (according to various discussions, there is still
much work to do for prototyping good GUIs in statistics / data analysis).

Tcl/Tk and library(tcltk) is nice and I will use it as much as possible in
SciViews... for what it is currently capable within R: dialog boxes. For
several reasons, it is not yet capable of handling all the features proposed
in SciViews. However, there are a few complete GUIs written in Tcl/Tk around
there, and I am pretty much confident that Peter Dalgaard will enhance the
tcltk library to a level that will allow replicating SciViews with it.
Active development of more sophisticated widgets thanks to bioconductor
people and others also contribute to this feeling.

RGtk and co currently suffers from two big problem: (1) it is not the
fastest, and (2) it is not yet Windows-compatible (according to some
discussions in r-sig-gui, Windows users are currently the priority target
for a R GUI). Yet, I look with much interest towards projects like Poor
Man's GUI of John Verzani, and I encourage it. Also, Gtk is much more OO
than Tcl/Tk, and this is a strong advantage for large projects.

ObveRsive is platform independent, and it explores various technical
solutions to be it. SciViews is not, but it is dedicated to explores various
GUI concepts. Do you see now the complementarity and interest of SciViews in
this context?

Thank you for your feedback.
Best,

Philippe

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( ( ( ( (       Dr. Philippe Grosjean
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