From bellis@hsph.harvard.edu  Thu Mar 14 18:57:42 2002
From: bellis@hsph.harvard.edu (Byron Ellis)
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 13:57:42 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [Rd] KDE frontend (PR#1384)
In-Reply-To: <20020314102201.D15816@jessie.research.bell-labs.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.10203141343460.4473-100000@hsph.harvard.edu>

On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Duncan Temple Lang wrote:

> Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:
> > egonw@sci.kun.nl writes:
> > 
> > > Full_Name: Egon Willighagen
> > > Version: 1.4.x
> > > OS: Linux/Solaris
> > > Submission from: (NULL) (131.174.179.30)
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I would like to have an gui for KDE (like gnome).
> > 
> > ...
> > However, this is a bit of a mouthful to implement. Do you have a
> > handle on how to go about it? Contributions are welcome...
> > 
> 
> Just thought I'd add this for the record.....
> 
> As a general strategy for building GUIs for use in R, I believe it
> will be much more beneficial to do this in two steps:
> 
>    a) create a set of R-language bindings to the GUI toolkit 
>       of interest (Qt in this case)
>    b) build one or more GUIs for R in the R language.
> 
> The obvious benefits are that i) we can use the bindings to write
> other GUIs, and ii) more people can adapt the GUI code to create their
> own customized version(s).  This hopefully avoids us creating "the" R
> GUI containing an interface to every function known to mankind!  A
> third benefit is that perhaps the GUI design can be more readily
> adapted for different toolkits (e.g. Gtk, Qt, wxWindows, MFC, etc.)

To toss in my $.02--it seems to me that it would be nice to push the GUIs
(or any interface) "out of the core" s.t. GUIs are basically creating an R
context just like any other embedding program. For most GUIs the main
executable (if I understand Duncan's comments correctly) would mostly be a
stub to get the GUI moving inside of the package that actually implements
the GUI itself (allowing for more control over the GUI from the R
environment---dynamic menus, etc, etc). Alternatively, there could be a
generalized GUI interface whose C interface is implemented by the main
executable and then registered (now that registration is nice)---this is
probably the more difficult route and perhaps the more limiting route in
the long run (various GUIs may have various nice features).

> 
> We already have bindings for several toolkits: the tcltk package to
> Tk, RGtk for Gtk/Gnome, (a recently more stable) SJava for Swing/AWT.
> The SWIG, the RGtk package, etc. might provide a place to look for
> automating the bindings to Qt.
> 
> The KDE toolkit, Qt, is C++ which makes it slightly more tricky to
> handle. But there are C bindings for it.

Well, it could be an ObjC binding :-)

> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > -- 
> >    O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
> >   c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
> >  (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
> > ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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> 
> -- 
> _______________________________________________________________
> 
> Duncan Temple Lang                duncan@research.bell-labs.com
> Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies    office: (908)582-3217
> 700 Mountain Avenue, Room 2C-259  fax:    (908)582-3340
> Murray Hill, NJ  07974-2070       
>          http://cm.bell-labs.com/stat/duncan
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> 


Byron Ellis (bellis@hsph.harvard.edu)
"Oook" - The Librarian

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[Rd] KDE frontend (PR#1384)
Byron Ellis