[R-SIG-Mac] cocoa packages

[Simon Urbanek]

On Oct 26, 2004, at 1:02 PM, Byron Ellis wrote:

> I think it could be useful for adding S-PLUS-like functionality to the 
> R GUI. Maybe for use in things like introductory statistics courses 
> (or Computational Biology courses). On the whole, a lot prettier than 
> Tcl/Tk and with some more work we could probably write selector 
> targets in R (a la CamelBones or PyObjC).

I agree that replacing tcl/tk is long overdue. You may have a look at 
the iWidgets package - I was trying to define a platform- and 
toolkit-independent API for widgets with that. It is implemented in 
Java and works on most platforms, but it would be great to have a Cocoa 
package with the same functionality and same API. The big thing then 
would be that you can actually use the same R code on any platform - on 
Mac it would happen to be Cocoa based. iWidgets come bundled with JGR ( 
http://www.rosuda.org/JGR/ ) if you want to run the demos, but you can 
also download the sources from our R repository ( 
http://www.rosuda.org/R/ ).

As of the Obj-C glue, well, you said it ;) It's not rocket science, 
just a lot of work ... I have very little time atm, but I may have a 
quiet minute this weekend to polish the REngine code ...

Cheers,
Simon