[RkWard-devel] Questions

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi!

> I just had a look at Rkward and it seems very promising.  I just have a
> couple of (probably very stupid) questions:
> 1) Why a php backend instead of a more "traditional" scripting language
> like python? There are a couple of python packages that can call R directly
> and manage R objects as if they were python objects. This question is not
> here to start a language war, but just out of curiosity.

Well, to a certain degree that decision is certainly related to my personal 
likes/dislikes. The reasons for using PHP are:
	- fairly well known and stable (applies to python as well)
	- lots of functionality esp. with respect to string-processing (probably 
applies to python as well)
	- it's a templating language, i.e. you can write plain R-code (or HTML in the 
output section) and only fill in the code in the changing sections
In the current design, PHP does not interface with R directly. Rather, the 
RKWard application is in charge of both and manages requests from both 
backends (actually, the R-backend can not yet do any requests, but in the 
future it should be possible e.g. to start a plugin from the R-console). 
Hence it is not necessary for PHP to access R directly. In fact, it might 
even raise some problems regarding threading/the proper order of execution of 
R-commands.
Of course all this is open to discussion.

> 2) As to the syntax highlighting problem mentioned on the home page, what
> about katepart? I think it already has R syntax highlighting.

The homepage has not been updated for more than a year (I had not worked on 
RKWard during that time). But in fact, I simply had not yet thought of that. 
This way implementing syntax highlighting will in fact be about as easy as it 
gets. Thanks for the hint.

Thomas