[rkward-devel] Help is needed

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Tuesday 21 June 2011, Peter Vorpahl wrote:
> Do you think it is possible to create a plugin to RKWard that on the one
> hand allows to easily access (load, export, modify) geospatial data

this bit sounds quite standard, so yes.

> and
> that on he other hand allows for advanced GUI interachtion with Map-Plots.
> Such as layer up/down, change of display parameters etc.
> I could imagine, that this would imply the co development of an advanced
> R-graphics device and an RKWard plugin that strongly interact with each
> other.

Note that several features of graphics device in RKWard are already realized 
as plugins (e.g. Device->Export..., and Edit->Draw Grid). See 
http://rkward.sourceforge.net/documents/devel/plugins/contextualized_plugins.html 
. I'm not sure, what exactly you have in mind, and whether such 
"contextualized plugins" are already good enough for your purposes. However, 
in principle, I believe it will probably be possible to add the required 
support without too much effort.

You may also want to take a look at the CLT-plugins (e.g. Distributions-
>Continuous->Beta->Beta CLT), to get an idea of what can be done with the 
plot-preview feature, alone.

Perhaps you can give some more detail?

> Another issue is that my favourite development environment is Microsofts
> Visual Studio. Linking to R is somewhat difficult with MSVC but not
> impossible. RKWard uses KDE libs. Are there any windows ports of their
> DLLs?

- The KDE libraries are also available as MSVC-compiled binaries. If you use 
"Package Manager" mode in the KDE on Windows installer, you will be able to 
select which compiler flavor you want to install.
- I know that the RKWard sources currently use some constructs (esp. 
"#warning"-directives), which are not compatible with MSVC in their current 
form, so this would need some cleanup, but I don't expect any significant 
problems, here.
- I know that others have complained about (unsurmountable?) difficulties in 
linking C++-code to R using MSVC. Personally, I have never cared about the 
details, so I'm not sure, how big a problem this is, but it is the part that I 
would be most worried about.
- You may be interested in our wiki page on compiling on Windows: 
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=RKWard_on_Windows/Packaging
As you can see, it is not quite trivial to set up everything, correctly. Quite 
likely some steps will need to be adjusted for compiling with MSVC. See 
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows for links to mailing list and 
IRC-channel for KDE on Windows, in case you need help with that. I know that 
some other KDE-based projects offer MSVC-compiled binaries on Windows, so you 
may also be able to get some help, there. E.g. digikam and kmymoney.

> Please let me know, if you have an Idea to solve my problems. I would
> very much appreciate it, if I could contribute to your project.

Well, I would certainly be glad to have you as a contributor!

Regards
Thomas

P.S.: I'll give you an answer to the questions you asked in private mail, as 
soon as I can find some time.
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