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

[Byron Ellis]

I seem to be missing these interim messages, very odd... anyways

On Wednesday, April 30, 2003, at 08:24  PM, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:

> 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:
>>

>> *snip*

>>> 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.

I bet they were passing images around and not display lists. I couldn't 
really say since I never used it though.

>>
>> (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

Java on the client side hasn't really worked out well for anyone. Java 
on the server side works but AFAIK is dreadfully inefficient. In any 
case, I'm not a fan of cross-platform GUIs in general--be they Java, 
Tcl/Tk, Gtk, whatever. They're a fact of life, but never the optimal 
solution as they, on at least one platform (which changes depending on 
where the project originated) break the native GUI paradigm which sort 
of defeats the purpose of having a GUI in the first place (that being 
employing muscle memory and diverse visual cues, not hand-holding 
users).

>
> ---
> 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
>
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Byron Ellis (bellis at hsph.harvard.edu)
"Oook" - The Librarian