[R] Building GUI for custom R application

[Bert Gunter]

Duncan Murdoch and Brian Ripley (I believe) have provided some limited but
serviceable native Windows GUI functionality within R for Windows. See
?winMenuAdd, ?choose.files , ?select.list, ?getGraphicsEvent,?winProgressBar
for examples and further links. Everything that you mention can be rather
simply done using this functionality (I've done it).

As others have said, much more extensive and powerful GUI functionality is
available through tcltk and associated packages like gWidgets,TkWidgets, and
others (including much stuff on Bioconductor). But beware! -- writing GUI's
that provide complex functionality is difficult. Computer scientists, web
designers, etc. have whole curricula devoted to this.

Cheers,
Bert

Bert Gunter
Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics
650-467-7374

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On
Behalf Of Gabor Grothendieck
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 4:17 AM
To: Barry Rowlingson
Cc: r-help at r-project.org; Harsh
Subject: Re: [R] Building GUI for custom R application

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Barry Rowlingson
<b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 9:23 AM, Harsh <singhalblr at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
>> 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.
>
>  You should say "I am not _yet_ a C/Perl/Python programmer". Don't
> limit yourself :)
>
>> 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?
>
>  If you are to admit the possibility of becoming a Python programmer
> (strongly recommended) I'd say you could do it with Python, Rpy, and
> the Qt library. The basic example you've outlined (choose file, select
> X and Y values, plot, display stats) would take about twenty minutes.
>
>  In fact, I've done half the work already, in adding almost just such
> functionality to Quantum GIS. See here:
>
>  http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~rowlings/Software/Spqr/
>
>  where the second screenshot shows variable selection and diagnostic
> plots of an lm from data in the GIS.
>
>  Distributing such an application might be tricky since it requires R,
> Rpy, PyQt4 to be installed or available, but it can be possible to
> build Python code into Windows .exe files with some effort.

Since you are using Windows (based on the fact you are considering
VB) note that rpy2 does not work with the recent versions of
python (as of a few months ago when I checked).

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