On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 15:53:43 -0700
Don MacQueen <macq@llnl.gov> wrote:
At 5:29 PM +0100 4/30/03, Luke Whitaker wrote:
On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Byron Ellis wrote:
On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, at 07:13 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> I think the best long term strategy is to have a clean division > between the user interface aspects of R (which are necessarily > platform dependent) and the underlying computing engine (which should
Precisely. I would actually say that R is -not- platform independent in that it expects a certain type of GUI--- a shell process living on STDIN and STDOUT that talks to an out-of-process Window Server of some sort. Most of the work done in the Windows GUI is spent faking that environment to make R think its still running on a X Server somewhere and similar work was done for the Mac/Carbon port (obviously, Darwin R can happily use Apple's X server). REventLoop takes some steps as does the work on embedding, but its still safer to run the "GUI" stuff out-of-process and even then not foolproof.
At the risk of starting a religous war, isn't java the obvious choice for a platform independent GUI ? I know java suffered a lot from early over hypeing when it wasn't really ready, but in the last year or two I've seen some very impressive platform independent GUI's built with java.
Not unless it's a whole lot better than Insightful's initial effort on Solaris. The GUI itself (i.e., how it operated, what menus were where, etc.) was fine, but it was completely useless for anyone sitting at a remote host, due to dreadful image quality and poor performance when displaying anywhere other than on the console of the machine on which SPlus was actually running. (maybe it was ok displayed on a remote host of the same architecture; I don't remember; but neither I nor any of the potential additional users was) -Don
It didn't work especially well on a local host on Linux either. I have used one other Java GUI which was even more unsatisfactory (bad graphics), so I would avoid Java all almost all cost. -Frank Harrell --- Frank E Harrell Jr Prof. of Biostatistics & Statistics Div. of Biostatistics & Epidem. Dept. of Health Evaluation Sciences U. Virginia School of Medicine http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat