[R-gui] Re: R-SIG-GUI Digest, Vol 8, Issue 3

[Nathan Whitehouse]

> 
> How good is Java these days for that sort of thing?
> I
> remember playing around with the original Swing JDK
> and wasn't particularly impressed (this was a long
> time ago obviously). 
  It's become more possible to do serious Java GUI
development.  Good examples of pretty nice all Java
stuff is the NetBeans(/Sun Forte) java development
environment, or Poseidon, a kindof community UML
editor.
  Of course, it's not as quick or easy to implement as
some other languages.

> I am also somewhat interested
> in
> a serious R GUI development effort. I think it would
> be nice to have some sort of GUI for R which would
> make R accessible to a wider audience. 
> 
  
  I've known a few people who use sciviews., and they
seem to like it.  
  I'm interested in a gui that allows more than a
GUIfied command line interface.  I'm interested in
something that allowed you to "layer" other
representations of the R code.  for example, a MDI
window might have two tabs, one of which was a
workspace with R objects(as icons) ordered by class. 
You can then associate them, perform operations, etc.
which would call macros, etc. and apply on the CLI. 
That way the actions would be transparent to the user
but also easily applied.

  Many of the investigators we work with would like to
use R-based analysis but just don't have the time to
learn the CLI.  Maybe these 'mods,' so to speak, would
encourage them to switch platforms.

  We're interested in a java-based GUI because we do
mostly java development.  But if Sciviews or something
else could do this, we're pretty interested.

  Best,
  Nathan Whitehouse
  Shaw lab