[rkward-devel] [JSS-Announce] Special issue on GUI's for R

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Friday 02 July 2010, Stefan Rödiger wrote:
> first of all I did not come as far as I wanted.

well, you got a lot further than I would have expected. Great work!

> Moreover my provider has
> technical issues. Thus I can not use svn.

Ok, we'll see if we can come up with a solution. Does anybody have an option 
to set up an FTP-server in an uncomplicated way?

> However, I think we will get a very interesting story. I please you to have
> a look into the document till Friday next week (or give me feedback how
> long you need). Please use the change tracking tool of OOo
> ("Edit/Changes/Record").

I'll focus on providing content for the technical section(s). I'm not sure 
whether I can promise to make it by Friday, but I will try.

> Figures are mostly place holders but should give a good impression of what
> will be there at the end. I had some troubles in first place to come up
> with empirical data (strange for somebody in medical/natural science)
> which describe the GUI development. Finally I came up with the idea to
> include metrics (download number, Google hits, LOC development,
> internationalization and such) used in other research fields. This will
> distinguish us from other papers in this field but will also help to
> understand why RKWard is where it is and what it is.

My overall impression is that the paper will end up pretty long, and I expect 
we will need to trim it down in the end. 

At the moment, I do not quite see which conclusion(s) we could base on the 
empirical data, and whether those conclusions are central to the paper. 
Currently my impression is that including empirical data is a nice idea, but 
when thinking about where we could trim, cutting this out would not hurt too 
much.

Regardless, here are some further hints:
- Ohloh has some interesting metrics, indeed, but for some reason they stopped 
updating their info on RKWard in 2008.
- It's not easy to come up with good download numbers. You probably know 
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=50231&ugn=rkward&mode=week&type=prdownload 
, but it lumps together the different file types, and does not include numbers 
from distributions/other sources, making it hard to interpret. Data from the 
debian popcon may be most interesting: 
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=rkward .

> Thinks like exact
> menu structure are not so important in my opinion (may find a home in the
> appendix).

Agreed.

> I have also some other things in mind (in especial usability
> metrics, form factor) but I need to gain some knowledge (reviewing
> literature, talk with an expert). Content wise I wrote down some thoughts,
> took information from the mailing list or the RKWard wiki (hope this is
> okay).

For larger chunks you may want to check who wrote them, so we can give credit 
to those who are not already on the list of authors. Some of the technical 
info you copied is a bit outdated... I'll comment / rewrite in the .odt.

> I have also found a bunch of literature (something like 20
> citations ("lit_02072010.html") right now) from peer-reviewed articles and
> other documents (books, abstracts, …). We certainly can cite more. How to
> install RKWard exactly is not so important in my opinion. This should be
> rather short, since there is a wiki, packages of different distros and the
> read me.

Agreed.

> The chapter "Structure of RKWard - Technical Design Overview" and
> "Programmer’s Niche – Extending RKWard" are certainly very, if not most,
> important. Best would be to satisfy many parties (the one who wants to
> know how it works, and the other who wants to know how to code a GUI
> plug-in).

I suggest relabelling the "Programmer's Niche" as "RKWard Plugin Example", and 
to move it to the Appendix, with a reference from (a sub-chapter of) the 
Technical Design Overview-chapter. I think both sections are closely related.

> One thing I still have trouble with is the overall statement of the paper.
> Currently it is just a description of RKWard. But it mustn't end here. The
> editors asked for papers which discuss GUIs in statistics and R (that
> where we make currently no comprehensive point), implement toolboxes
> (that's where we fit well), GUIs for the desktop or cloud (that's where we
> fit good) and other features R should have (that where we currently make
> no point). But we will get there.

I think it is not mandatory to cover *all* of these points. I will try to give 
special attention to the reasons for some design decisions in the technical 
section.

Regards
Thomas
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