[RkWard-devel] RKWard development docs online

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi!

> The various plugins have
> access to each other.

Yes, that's another thing I'm planning. Plus, of course, you should be able to 
invoke plugins from the R command-editor/shell. The "id"-attribute in the 
<entry>-tag of the plugin-xml is planned to become some sort of mechanism for 
identifying plugins.

> The trick here is that each plugin is actually  a 
> full
> mini-application which just takes advantage of the micro-framework of the
> app to integrate nicely. This makes creating "dynamic" plugins easy, and
> eliminates the need to rewrap the whole toolkit.

This might in fact be a nice additional possibility. You see, I kind of like 
the simplicity fo the current plugin-xml, and again, I think something very 
simple like this will cover a large amount or even the majority of 
cases/plugnis. However, for more complicated stuff, an approach like actually 
_programming_ plugins in pyQt or similar may be a good additional concept. A 
lot will still have to be done to get that going, but it should be possible 
to find a way to reuse the specialized widgets like varselectors, etc. there.
BTW, thinking about your comment about plugins having access to each other, I 
also had another nifty idea (or did you mean just that?): embedding plugins 
in plugins. Like for example, you may have dozens of plugins that print out 
their result as a data.frame. We might then have one single plugin that can 
deal with just that: printing a data.frame, taking into account some user 
settings. This plugin along with its GUI and code could be embedded in the 
other plugins, say, in a tab/page "output formatting". If the embedded plugin 
gets enhanced, all the embedding plugins will profit automatically.
Well, there's a lot of cool stuff left to implement.

> The whole thing is written 
> in python/wxPython  (no C/C++) and so far does not call R, but can. The
> source is rather messy (deadlines...), but there is a report going with it,
> unfortunately in French. If you're interested, tell me (maybe off-list,
> since this may not be the place to discuss this!)

Well, I'm afraid my French is rather a little rusty, and I won't be able to 
understand much of a technical text written in French. But keep on bringing 
in the ideas!

> > Ok, you're right. Personally, when using RKWard, I'll probably switch it
> > back to dialog, but as a default, wizard is probably reasonable.
>
> What about a global setting?

Umm - there is one. Settings->Configure Settings->Plugins. I thought you were 
talking about changing the default there? Note that not all the example 
plugins have a wizard-interface, yet, and the "recommended"-attribute 
generally is not set.

Thomas