How good is Java these days for that sort of thing? I remember playing around with the original Swing JDK and wasn't particularly impressed (this was a long time ago obviously).
It's become more possible to do serious Java GUI development. Good examples of pretty nice all Java stuff is the NetBeans(/Sun Forte) java development environment, or Poseidon, a kindof community UML editor. Of course, it's not as quick or easy to implement as some other languages.
I am also somewhat interested in a serious R GUI development effort. I think it would be nice to have some sort of GUI for R which would make R accessible to a wider audience.
I've known a few people who use sciviews., and they seem to like it. I'm interested in a gui that allows more than a GUIfied command line interface. I'm interested in something that allowed you to "layer" other representations of the R code. for example, a MDI window might have two tabs, one of which was a workspace with R objects(as icons) ordered by class. You can then associate them, perform operations, etc. which would call macros, etc. and apply on the CLI. That way the actions would be transparent to the user but also easily applied. Many of the investigators we work with would like to use R-based analysis but just don't have the time to learn the CLI. Maybe these 'mods,' so to speak, would encourage them to switch platforms. We're interested in a java-based GUI because we do mostly java development. But if Sciviews or something else could do this, we're pretty interested. Best, Nathan Whitehouse Shaw lab