[RkWard-devel] RKWard development docs online

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

> Well, having plugins written in python would be a great advantage there,
> since there are interfaces between python and R.
> see:
> RSPython
> http://www.omegahat.org/RSPython/
> and Rpy:
> http://rpy.sourceforge.net/

Note, however, that there may arise threading issues. It will be easily 
possible to have python-plugins "living" in the main thread and using the 
RCommand/RInterface-API to submit commands. That API of course will return 
replies form R only as arrays of char*/int or double or plain text, and does 
not support more direct object manipulation. E.g. something like:

resultstring = doRCall ("print (\"this is the result\")");
resultvector = getRVector ("c (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)");

I'm not quite sure, whether Rpy or RSPython offer more advanced handling of R 
objects?
It will also be easy to have python-plugins live inside R and the 
corresponding thread, as long as those don't need to make calls to 
RKWard/GUI.
Having a combination of both is not easily possible (which is not to say 
impossible, but it won't be quite as easy).

> I'll try to have a look if I have some time. I should start by learning Qt
> I guess! I know Gtk (a big little) and wxWidgets (very well) so I suppose
> it shouldn't be too difficult.

Well, Qt is really fairly nice in that it uses very consistent naming, etc. 
and comes with excellent documentation (http://doc.trolltech.com/3.3/). I 
don't know how different it is to Gtk or wxWidgets, but it should not be too 
hard to get into.

Thomas