[R-gui] FXPy R Gui toolkit?

[James Wettenhall]

Hi,

[Preamble, then example/prototype: ]

I was looking at the recent discussion of which toolkit to use 
for GUIs in R in the future, (ignoring for the moment the 
SciViews/Visual Basic stuff which looks great!)  Dirk suggested 
that wxWindows/wxWidgets is the emerging consensus.  

I guess we need some working prototypes to evaluate things 
further.  I would still consider FOX as possibly being easier to 
work with than wxWindows, e.g. see Zed Shaw's post:

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-gui/2002-October/000016.html

which says:
"The disadvantage is that wxWindows is a P-I-G!  It's huge,
requires tons of libraries, always needs a very complicated 
linking process which takes me forever to get right on any 
platform."
<SNIP>
"FOX is very very well designed, extremely easy to work with, 
well documented, super small,"

My experience under Windows NT/2000 has tended to agree with Zed 
in that wxWindows is not easy to build, especially if you are 
trying to do it with MinGW's g++ (or even cygwin), rather than 
Visual C++.  Most wxWindows/wxWidgets experts would advise you 
to use Visual C++, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to build 
R packages with MinGW or similar?  Would going through wxPython 
or similar simplify compilation issues of wxWindows source code, 
but still present linking issues?

I've had a go at working towards a rough prototype of 
using the FOX GUI toolkit with R, initially through Python 
(accessing Tk through Tcl isn't too bad is it?).  This of 
course is not a valid argument for why FOX is better than 
wxWindows, because you can presumably do the same with 
wxPython.  Anybody?

I have a Hello-Worldish example of using FOX from R via 
RSPython, but there are a few glitches to work through:

http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/folders/james/fxpy/


Unfortunately, Python (not FOX) has MS Visual C++ build 
issues too, i.e. it is very difficult to build in MinGW:

http://uucode.com/texts/python-mingw/python-mingw.html

and it is quite strict in that it won't let you build and 
install Python extensions using MinGW if python itself is built 
with MS Visual C++ (which it always is).  But maybe it's OK to 
just use MSVC-built binaries of Python and the GUI toolkit and 
then just use the python bindings for the GUI classes.

Wishing I could be at userR,
James