On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 17:25 +0200, Peter Dalgaard wrote: > Sean Davis wrote: > > On Wednesday 28 March 2007 06:25, Roger Bivand wrote: > > > >> On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Hin-Tak Leung wrote: > >> > >>> Hmm, if all you are interested is reading/writing Excel spreadsheets > >>> from R, there are much lighter and easier ways of doing it, than > >>> hooking up with openoffice. The Perl people have had > >>> Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel for years (and > >>> they work quite well, personal experience). Those are tiny > >>> (a couple of Mb's?) compared to the size of openoffice. > >>> > >> I don't think this is the problem here - the proposal says: "Create an > >> add-on component that allows a Calc user to let the R environment do > >> calculations on data from Calc cells and put the results into the > >> spreadsheet again". It feels much more like embedding R in the OO > >> spreadsheet and/or elsewhere, which would be similar to using DCOM in > >> Excel. There would also be questions about how tightly integrated an > >> embedded R should be, how functionality would be provided and documented, > >> and how such a setup ought to be administered and maintained. > >> > >> As RExcel, the structure depends crucially on having joint expertise in > >> place to write and maintain the R script glue (dialogues) to provide the > >> functionality being added to Calc. Typically, this would be something an > >> organisation of some size might need, but it would be unlikely to be a GUI > >> for novice R users unwilling to scale the learning curve (a steep learning > >> curve, of course, means learn a lot in a short time, hence a good thing!). > >> > > > > There are examples of doing this with Excel, which have been quite > > successful. > > Here is at least one example (which I post for potential contact > > information): > > > > http://linus.nci.nih.gov/BRB-ArrayTools.html > > > I feel (without much hard evidence to build the feeling on...) that the > main issue is that OOo isn't making it really clear what the preferred > embedding/interfacing methods should be. I did look into the related > issue of database connectivity at some point; toying with the idea of > using oobase or oocalc as a backend for RODBC, but apparently no ODBC > interface exists. (The other way around is possible: using oobase as a > front end for e.g. mysql via ODBC).
OO.org's Base is an embedded HSQLDB java based database application (http://hsqldb.org/). To my knowledge it does not support ODBC, but at least in the 'non-embedded' versions, there is a JDBC interface available. This issue comes up periodically on the OO.org lists, which I tend to peruse and occasionally post to via gmane. For whomever might pursue this, there is a list of OO.org projects here: http://projects.openoffice.org/index.html including sections for API's etc. HTH, Marc ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel