[RkWard-devel] Questions

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi Steve!

>         I am both a Linux and Windows R user.  At work, I can only use
> Windows.  How much of RKWard is generalizable so that it can work on
> multiple platforms?  For example, if R is linked to an office suite for
> producing output, it might be wiser to link it to OpenOffice instead of
> KOffice.

I agree, that a platform independent solution would ultimately be preferrable. 
Right now, my primary concern is to get a solution for Linux. KDE/Qt offers a 
lot of nice gadgets that allow me to make progress relatively quickly. So 
that's why I'm using the current approach.
How much of it could be ported easily?
Well, for one thing, it should be relatively easy to spearate out the 
KDE-stuff and use a pure Qt-solution. That's portable to Windows and Mac - if 
you own the licence (which I don't). Using some KDE-parts once again allows 
me to make faster progress right now, but porting to pure Qt will not be a 
problem for most components even at a much later point of time.
About the office suite: I don't really know how I will approach this, yet. 
I've thought of KOffice mostly because it can be easily embedded as a 
KDE-part. However, my current idea is to use HTML as a primary output-format 
and then later let whatever office suite I will use deal with that (it may 
not be trivial to add hooks back to RKWard, but some way or another this 
should be doable with OpenOffice, too). Anyway, since I'm using HTML as an 
intermediate format, the design is still fairly flexible in this aspect.
One thing that is completely portable right now is the plugins (currently the 
entries in the Analyse-menu). Since those get generated at runtime and 
require only PHP for processing, it would be possible to write a Windows 
application (using whatever programming language) that could make use of the 
same plugins. Since much of the functionality will be done in plugins, this 
will in fact make up a significant part of the application (not yet, of 
course).
To sum it up: Porting RKWard should be doable in principle. However, I think 
using a KDE/Qt-solution is the way to go at least for the time being. As long 
as I'm the only active developer on the project, it's the only chance of 
getting to a somewhat useful state in a reasonable amount of time. My hope 
is, that at that point some further developers join the project and we can 
reconsider our options then.

Thomas