[R-gui] Mixing GUI packages

Hi Christiaan,

This is (as you probably expect) an "it depends" question for at least 
two reasons. One thing that complicates everything is the underlying 
widget toolkit that is being used. The goal of gWidgets is to be 
agnostic with respect to the underlying GUI toolkit, but seems to have 
the most functionality under GTK2 (via the RGTK package), while both 
fgui and rpanel use Tcl/Tk  (via the tcltk package). gWidgets will work 
with Tcl/Tk and the tcltk package, but you may want to make sure you can 
get the functionality you want from gWidgets when using Tcl/Tk. Mixing 
GTK2 and Tcl/Tk in even a loosely coupled setup seems like asking for 
trouble (and the installation process for novice Mac users could be 
really trying). The second question is how tightly integrated do you 
want all the various dialogs you create to be? If they are very loose, 
you may well be OK using a number of different high level R GUI 
"frameworks". However, I can see where maintenance of the system you 
develop could be a real headache, particularly if you want the 
components to be tightly integrated. The upshot, if you can base 
everything on using the R tcltk package as the foundation, then what you 
are proposing is probably do-able, but by mixing and matching higher 
level R GUI frameworks you may be trading-off short-term implementation 
gains for long-term maintenance headaches. Personally, in this situation 
I would stick with the higher level GUI framework that is the most 
flexible, even it it is not the easiest for creating "quick and dirty" 
user dialog boxes.

Dan

Hi Everybody

I have to make a gui for a collection of my functions in order to make it
easier for my colleagues (who are very code-shy and function strictly in a
point and click environment).

I have trawled the web for documentation and have come to the preliminary
conclusion that I am going to use the gWidgets package for this task but
fgui and rpanel seems to make some aspects easy to implement.

Is it feasible to use gWidgets, fgui as well as rpanel in one
implementation or should one stick to one of these and do everything with
the one gui package?

regards
Christiaan

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