[R-gui] [Rd] R GUI considerations

[Philippe Grosjean]

Thomas Friedrichsmeier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
>>Qt is C++, cross-platform using native widgets on OS X and Win and (since
>>more recently) available without fee or license woes provided it is used
>>for GPL'ed code.
>>
>>So it satisfies both the requirement to make it look and feel native
>>whereever possible, and satisfies the preference for an OO paradigm for GUI
>>programming.
>>
>>Would it be an alternative?  Is it worth a prototype app?
> 
> 
> If you seriously consider writing a Qt app, please have a look at RKWard (at 
> least to find out, which portions of the code to reuse). RKWard is not a pure 
> Qt app, however, but a KDE app. KDE 4 is promised to be cross-platform (but 
> won't be released for another year or so), so I hope RKWard will be 
> cross-platform, then.
> Also, note that RKWard uses a somewhat different approach, than most other 
> R-GUIs (as far as I know), in that _all_ the GUI stuff is done in C++-code 
> (or plugins). There is no API to build GUI(-elements) from R in rkward, and I 
> don't have plans to add that in the near future.
> On the discussion iniated by Philippe: I don't think there will ever be a 
> single united R GUI. It's not like this discussion has not come up before. I 
> agree this has something to do with individualistic developers, and I'll 
> admit to being one myself. But there are other reasons as well.
> What I do believe, is that there could be collaboration in some areas. Years 
> ago I proposed a standard for defining some GUI-elements. Philippe was pretty 
> much the only person expressing interest at that time, but now uses an 
> entirely different approach.
> Another area could be drawing up a flexible output-format, and R-methods to 
> create such output. R2HTML does a pretty good job, for the time being, but 
> ultimately, we'll want an output format that does some more abstraction, for 
> instance, to allow changing the number of digits to display on the fly, etc. 
> If we could agree on a common standard for this, it could save all projects a 
> lot of effort. (But no, I haven't worked out any specific ideas for this, 
> yet).
> I think you'll have a hard time, convincing any of the projects to give up 
> their individualistic approaches (including any agreement, even on which 
> programming language to use). All I can see is some projects might share some 
> common standards.
> 
> Regards
> Thomas

I suspect you are more interested by the challenge of making a R GUI 
than of having that GUI fully operational for everyday work. People like 
me *do need* a fully-featured R GUI for their everyday work... and miss 
it! I spend countless hours to achieve this goal, and I ultimately 
arrive to the conclusion that the entreprise is huge, and it is very 
difficult to reach the goal for a single person that dedicate a little 
bit of its free time to such a project. So, yes, I am ready to give up 
SciViews and all my convictions to work *collectively* on a common R GUI 
project. I hope there are other people out there that are more 
interested by the result than by the fun of starting and managing yet 
another project on their own,... and that they progressively arrive to 
the same conclusion: we need to harness several programmers on the same 
project to have any chance to finish a really full-featured R GUI in a 
reasonable amount of time.

Another problem, for a slowly moving project like SciViews-R is the fast 
evolution of R itself. It means that almost all the available time is 
spend making changes just to keep the GUI compatible with the latest R 
version, leaving very little time for programming new features and for 
writting the documentation.

I took a look at Qt a few times, and I was always stopped by the 
commercial license (at least under Windows). I just visit Qt web site. 
Yes, indeed, there is a GPL license now. Very good news!

Best,

Philippe Grosjean