[R-gui] New package gWidgetsWWW

[john verzani]

I've uploaded to CRAN a new package: gWidgetsWWW.

This package allows one to use the gWidgets API to create dynamic webpages. A
basic template for a page consists of some HTML header code to call in the
necessary jvascript libraries, then gWidgets code which--may be sourced in--to
produce the page, and then a simple HTML footer. No HTML coding knowledge is
needed. Examples are given in the package. A bit more information is found at
http://www.math.csi.cuny.edu/pmg/gWidgets/gWidgetsWWW. Hopefully the next
release will have some more documentation, but I wanted to see if this is of any
interest first.

Quite a bit of the gWidgets API is implemented, although there are some
differences detailed in its help page. One key difference is that the package
gWidgets is not used, so one calls in the package with require(gWidgetsWWW,
quietly=TRUE). Instead of dispatch using gWidgets and S4 methods, the proto
package is used. This is used in a new gWidgetsWWW specific constructor to
manipulate Google maps.

The hard work is done by the Rpad package (www.rpad.org) which allows a web page
to call back into an R process. Rpad has a local and server version. This has
been tested with the local version. If a server version is of interest, be sure
to read the security section of http://www.rpad.org/Rpad/BasicDocumentation.html

gWidgetsWWW just creates javascript calls that create and modify the current
webpage. The javascript created uses the EXT JS javascript libraries
(www.extjs.com). These can be downloaded and installed locally.

Please feel free to email with bug reports and questions.