R devel - Oct 2005 - Project suggestion: Interface between R and graphic devices

Hi to all developer,
sure that I will not be the first one with this idea but I did not found 
treads about this.
I realized that there are some user interfaces like Brodgar and SciViews.
There was used a lot of manpower to develop those programs.
On the other side I realized that it could be very helpful to have such 
programs if somebody would like to change the statistical software from 
SPSS or other commercial software to R-Statistic. The first steps would 
be more easy and the acceptance of R would be much more than with the 
command line interpreter.
It would be a great help to introduce R in the institutes, which does 
not use R just now.
One of the features of R is that it is state of the art all the time. If 
anybody would use R version 1.?? because of any graphic devise it would 
not be helpful.

So my suggestion:
Is it possible to define any interface between the R-system and the Gui 
applications, so that the GUIs, but only the interface does  need to 
rebuild if the R-system is changed.

I am out of order with programming since ten years, but it seems (but it 
not sure just now) that I have more time to oversee such a project. But 
I will need a lot of advice the first time.
I was developing the software for medical systems and this would be a 
complete new subject for me.

with regards
Knut Krueger
http://www.biostatistic.de

I think you do not mean `graphics devices' as used by R (pdf, postscript, 
X11, windows, quartz etc).

Rather I think you mean interfacing to a different front end.  That is a 
subject discussed in `Writing R Extensions' and an API for it has been 
defined for a few R versions now.

The JGR and MacGUI front ends are examples of what can be done, and 
gnoneGUI is a reference example.  There is a mailing list (R-SIG-GUI) and 
an overview page at http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/  (I noted that JGR for 
Windows seems to need updating to work on 2.2.0: it demands 2.1.x.)

Rcmdr is a powerful example of how a cross-platform GUI can be built 
entirely in R.  In particular, my understanding is that it is specifically 
designed to ease the transition from SPSS to R.

Given that background, what more precisely do you think is needed and 
would not the R-SIG-GUI list be more appropriate?


On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Knut Krueger wrote:
> Hi to all developer,
> sure that I will not be the first one with this idea but I did not found
> treads about this.
> I realized that there are some user interfaces like Brodgar and SciViews.
> There was used a lot of manpower to develop those programs.
> On the other side I realized that it could be very helpful to have such
> programs if somebody would like to change the statistical software from
> SPSS or other commercial software to R-Statistic. The first steps would
> be more easy and the acceptance of R would be much more than with the
> command line interpreter.
> It would be a great help to introduce R in the institutes, which does
> not use R just now.
> One of the features of R is that it is state of the art all the time. If
> anybody would use R version 1.?? because of any graphic devise it would
> not be helpful.
>
> So my suggestion:
> Is it possible to define any interface between the R-system and the Gui
> applications, so that the GUIs, but only the interface does  need to
> rebuild if the R-system is changed.
>
> I am out of order with programming since ten years, but it seems (but it
> not sure just now) that I have more time to oversee such a project. But
> I will need a lot of advice the first time.
> I was developing the software for medical systems and this would be a
> complete new subject for me.
>
> with regards
> Knut Krueger
> http://www.biostatistic.de
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595