[R-gui] R GUI considerations (was: R, Wine, and multi-threadedness)

[James Wettenhall]

Hi Philippe and everyone else,

As you know, I have certainly spent some time thinking about R-GUIs, and
developing some R-Tcl/Tk GUIs - limmaGUI and affylmGUI (available from
Bioconductor).  I have also spent some time wishing we could use a GUI
toolkit with a more modern look and feel.  Hence I have investigated
wxWidgets, and thought that using wxPython might be the easiest way to
interface it from R, but I ran into some technical problems (especially
because I was obsessed with trying to make the interface from R to wx seem
not-too-object-oriented, i.e. I like the idea of 1. create a dialog, 2.
add a button etc. like in Tcl/Tk rather defining a dialog class, then
defining an object which is an instance of that class and then invoking a
show method on that object etc.)

I can't really afford to make R-GUIs much of a priority in my work any
more (so I may not read these philosophical discussions about which GUI
toolkit is best as closely as I used to), but I'm happy to answer any
specific questions about my experience with R-GUI development.  I hope
that doesn't sound too presumptuous of me, but I think that John Fox's
R-Tcl/Tk GUI package (Rcmdr) and mine (limmaGUI and affylmGUI) are some of
the most sophisticated (and most popular in terms of users) attempts to
build a platform-independent GUI interface to a command-line R package (or
packages).  And then there are other really nice GUIs for R which are not
necessarily platform independent - like some of Philippe's SciViews
software, and I recently came across a really nice GUI using GraphApp
(Windows only) for connecting to ODBC - I think it was in Brian Ripley's
RODBC package.

One point I wanted to make here is that there are some people in the R
community who have really great experience to offer from trying to develop
better R GUIs, but who don't necessarily participate on the R-SIG-GUI
mailing list.  For example, I was talking to Jan de Leeuw on the R-SIG-MAC
mailing list and he mentioned that he has done some great work trying to
interface R-wxPython, but that it was difficult maintaining the glue
between the different components.  And there are people in Bioconductor
(e.g. Jianhua Zhang - widgetTools & tkWidgets,  Jeff Gentry -
widgetInvoke) and there are people who have been involved in OmegaHat e.g.
Duncan Temple Lang who all have great experience to offer.

But some of the 'philosophical' ideas that people would like to implement
e.g. interfacing R and wxWidgets 'directly' without going through Python
(e.g. using Cable Swig) (or interfacing R and Tk via C rather than via
Tcl) seem like a massive task, and no-one seems sufficiently motivated to
provide money to employ someone (or multiple people) to do something as
big as that.

Just my thoughts.  Feel free to ignore.
Regards,
James