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

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 15:53:43 -0700
Don MacQueen <macq at llnl.gov> wrote:

> At 5:29 PM +0100 4/30/03, Luke Whitaker wrote:
> >On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Byron Ellis wrote:
> >
> >>  On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, at 07:13  AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> >
> >>  > I think the best long term strategy is to have a clean division
> >>  > between the user interface aspects of R (which are necessarily
> >>  > platform dependent) and the underlying computing engine (which should
> >>
> >>  Precisely. I would actually say that R is -not- platform independent in
> >>  that it expects a certain type of GUI--- a shell process living on
> >>  STDIN and STDOUT that talks to an out-of-process Window Server of some
> >>  sort. Most of the work done in the Windows GUI is spent faking that
> >>  environment to make R think its still running on a X Server somewhere
> >>  and similar work was done for the Mac/Carbon port (obviously, Darwin R
> >>  can happily use Apple's X server). REventLoop takes some steps as does
> >>  the work on embedding, but its still safer to run the "GUI" stuff
> >>  out-of-process and even then not foolproof.
> >
> >At the risk of starting a religous war, isn't java the obvious choice
> >for a platform independent GUI ? I know java suffered a lot from
> >early over hypeing when it wasn't really ready, but in the last year
> >or two I've seen some very impressive platform independent GUI's
> >built with java.
> 
> Not unless it's a whole lot better than Insightful's initial effort on Solaris.
> 
> The GUI itself (i.e., how it operated, what menus were where, etc.) 
> was fine, but it was completely useless for anyone sitting at a 
> remote host, due to dreadful image quality and poor performance when 
> displaying anywhere other than on the console of the machine on which 
> SPlus was actually running.
> 
> (maybe it was ok displayed on a remote host of the same architecture; 
> I don't remember; but neither I nor any of the potential additional 
> users was)
> 
> -Don

It didn't work especially well on a local host on Linux either.  I have used one other Java GUI which was even more unsatisfactory (bad graphics), so I would avoid Java all almost all cost.  -Frank Harrell

---
Frank E Harrell Jr              Prof. of Biostatistics & Statistics
Div. of Biostatistics & Epidem. Dept. of Health Evaluation Sciences
U. Virginia School of Medicine  http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat