On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Sebastian Mellor <seb...@sebble.com> wrote:
> On 10 June 2011 18:41, Ian Fellows <ian.fell...@stat.ucla.edu> wrote: > > > > > > > Ian, Michael, > > >> From my experience with the available packages for developing GUIs, > when > > a > > > small, efficient sequence of dialogs or controls and plots is needed > > there > > > are many polished examples written within R. I have not disregarded > > other > > > options such as embedding R within a C program, or using another > external > > > GUI but an important part of this project (which I should have > mentioned > > > before) is being able to move back to the command line to tweak > > parameters > > > and re-run as batch scripts -- how I do this I am not yet sure but > > staying > > > in R may make this easier. In my opinion GTK and Qt have some nice > > widget > > > elements, even tcltk on my system looks reasonable. > > > > Just to clarify my (admittedly controversial) opinion. I didn't mean that > > good GUIs can't be embedded within R, I meant that if you need to do > > something that goes beyond placing widgets in a window, you probably will > > want to write the GUI code in another language and call it from R. For > > example, speedR's GUI interactively calls R but is written in Java. > > > I agree, if we were hoping to load a lot of data into an interactive table > or provide a more tailored experience with a smooth UI, tooltips, dynamic > context menus and customised layouts I would opt for a more powerful GUI > language (or at least move down a layer or two gWidgets -> Gtk/Qt/Java), > but > in our case the functions to wrap are comparatively simple (not combined in > any complex overly complex ways) and fairly well parameterised, the plots > should provide most of the visual information feedback. I may yet find a > need for more control. > > In my opinion, R is a pretty good GUI language, especially with the new reference classes. It has quickly developing support for interactive graphics, like qtpaint/cranvas, and with vectorized computations can achieve reasonable performance. Both RGtk2 and qtbase allow implementation of custom widgets (by extending GObject and Qt classes, respectively). I really don't see any significant advantages to Java, except that a for() loop is faster (but then with R, one can usually avoid for() loops altogether, and Swing is one of the most frustrating toolkits I've encountered). Good luck, Michael Thanks for your thoughts, > Seb > > > > > ian > > > > _______________________________________________ > > R-SIG-GUI mailing list > > R-SIG-GUI@r-project.org > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-gui > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > _______________________________________________ > R-SIG-GUI mailing list > R-SIG-GUI@r-project.org > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-gui > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-SIG-GUI mailing list R-SIG-GUI@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-gui
