[R] Building GUI for custom R application

[Harsh]

HI R users,
I would appreciate information/examples/suggestions on building GUIs
for R applications.
I am currently working on a project that would require the following
functionalities :

1) Display a  window to the user. Provide a function to scan local
drive and choose dataset file.
2) Display the column names for the user to choose the dependent
variable and the independent variables.
3) Fit regression and display statistics.

While researching the possibility of creating a GUI which would allow
for the above mentioned computations, I came across:

1) rpanel: Simple Interactive Controls for R Functions Using the tcltk Package
Found In: Journal of Statistical Software, January 2007, Volume 17, Issue 9.


2) Putting RGtk to Work, James Robison-Cox
Found In:Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed
Statistical Computing (DSC 2003),March 20–22, Vienna, Austria ISSN
1609-395X
http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2003/

Item 2 provides an example of creating a regression application with
slider controls for a parameter in loess function used in the example
application in that paper.
For documentation on RGtk the author recommends reading the Gtk
tutorial and documentation. I seem to have difficulty in making sense
of the Gtk documentation since most of it is in C and documentation is
available for use of Gtk with Perl and Python. I am not a
C/Perl/Python programmer.

Moreover, I am creating a Windows Application and is using RGtk2 the
only way to create a GUI for an R application?
Or should I use the the VB approach and create the GUI separately and
call R scripts where required to do the back-end computation?

Another approach (to make the visualization more rich and dynamic) is
to use Adobe FLEX front end and communicate with R using the RSOAP
library. There is very sparse documentation relevant to using RSOAP. I
have not been able to find examples or tutorials using RSOAP. Any
information in this regard will be highly appreciated.

The Biocep project provides 'R for cloud computing' but unfortunately
I have not been able to extract relevant 'juice' from their webpage.
What i did get is their R workbench, but that has not answered my
above mentioned queries.

Regards,

Harsh Singhal