If you're looking for a GUI toolkit that: 1. Is cross-platform, 2. Has a good collection of widgets that look good on all platforms, and 3. Is easy to work with from R
then it is hopeless. There is no such toolkit. As one poster mentioned, most of the better GUI toolkits are very object-oriented, because that paradigm is a good fit for GUI programming. There are a few programming environments out there that do have nice GUI abilities, but they all use base languages that are not very R-like, and so the potential R GUI programmer is faced with having to use two very different languages for his creation. And even if that obstacle is surmounted, there remains the difficulty of trying to package up his work in such a way as to make it easily installed by others. Things are always breaking in the interfaces between R and whatever you're using. Trying to keep it all running and packaging it for deployment are thankless, gargantuan tasks. There is a better way, and that is to give up on R. Start over with a better programming environment, one that is object oriented, as flexible and dynamic as R, is cross platform, easy to program in, and has decent GUI facilities already. Then port the stuff in R that does statistical programming, and you have the best of all worlds. The environment I am thinking about is VisualWorks Smalltalk, which is free for noncommercial use. As a language, Smalltalk is both simpler and more powerful than R, and the VM it runs on is much faster than the R interpreter. It has superior garbage collection and the best IDE in the business. Callouts to C are just as easy as they are in R, but would likely not be needed as often due to the faster VM and much better programming facilities. Interfaces to various databases are possible, and the most powerful web toolkit (Seaside) is written in Smalltalk and runs under VisualWorks. There are a couple of other Smalltalk environments around that could also be considered. Squeak is an open source cross-platform Smalltalk that is not as fast as VisualWorks, but still must faster and more robust than the R interpreter. Smalltalk/X is another possibility, though it works only on Windows and Unix. Think about it. Once you have a basic math package that can handle matrix programming and various mathematical functions, building the various statistical modeling tools on top of them is not that hard. What makes S and R so much better than SAS is their programmability. Smalltalk is like that, only better. Jeff Hallman ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
