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

[Stefan Rödiger]

Dear list,

Thomas gave me a kind reminder to add the next version of the JSS paper to 
SVN. If you want add your content and make changes. Maybe you could give a 
brief feedback on the list what you plan and how long it likely will take.

Meik & Thomas: As far as I remember you worked on a plugin download feature. 
Is this something to include?

Prasenjit: You worked on the plot history feature. I already added some notes 
to the manuscript. It would be great if you could write this section. Maybe 
you could also make a comparison to competitive products. Correct me if I'm 
wrong but RGui under Windows seems to be the only product? Great starting 
point.

Kind regards
Stefan


Am Sonntag 04 Juli 2010, 14:14:13 schrieb 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&m
> ode=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