gWidgets2
packageThe gWidgets2
package is a rewrite of the gWidgets
package that
allows R users to easily create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) from
within R in a toolkit-independent manner. The package itself sets up
an API for describing these interfaces. An accompanying package
integrates this into the underlying toolkit library.
Currently there are the following packages:
gWidgets2RGtk2
for interfacing with the GTK
set of widgets through the RGtk2
package.
gWidgets2tcltk
for interfacing with the TCL/TK
widgets through the tcltk
package.
gWidgets2Qt
for interfacing with the Qt
set of widget through the qtbase
Additionally, for web programming the packages gWidgetsWWW2
and
gWidgetsWWW2.rapache
implement basically the same API using the
ExtJs JavaScript libraries.
To use the package you need to have intalled: the underlying graphical
toolkit libraries, one of the basic R interfaces (RGtk2
, tcltk
or
Qt
), then gWidgets2
and one or more of the gWidgets2XXX
packages. The tcltk
interface is usually the easiest, as the
underlying graphical toolkit libraries are bundled with the standard
windows binary of R, thought RGtk2
and Qt
versions work with a
much richer underlying set of controls.
The gWidgets2
API exposes only a small subset of what is available
in the underlying toolkit, but does it in a fairly easy to learn way
using many of R
's standard methods, as possible.
A basic example of making a "hello world" app would be:
w <- gwindow("Hello...", visible=FALSE) ## a parent container
g <- ggroup (cont = w) ## A box container
b <- gbutton("Click me for a message", cont=g, expand=TRUE) ## some control
addHandlerClicked(b, function(...) { ## adding a callback to an event
gmessage("Hello world!", parent=w) ## a dialog
})
visible(w) <- TRUE ## a method call
Though short, this example illustrates the range of basic tasks needed
to construct a GUI. Some other examples are in the examples
directory of the package and the package vignette
.
gWidgets
package?This should be much faster (early benchmarking is about 10-100% as fast). The gWidgets package had a cumbersome dispatch mechanism based on S4 methods. This rewrite uses a lighter-weight S3 dispatch and reference classes.
Should be easier to maintain. The documentation is done with roxygen2. The old version was by hand. It required some tedious stuff, best left unsaid.
rethinking some of the argument names, functions etc.. I don't think
we need gcommandline
, gformlayout
, ggenericwidget
, etc. These
are best left to a separate package, if at all. Most of the
arguments were made to be consistent. There weren't major changes,
but enough to warrant adding a "2" to the package name.
The code in the toolkit implementations needed cleaning up. Lots of it. This rewrite gave reason to do so.
putting more structure on the toolkit. Before the class structure was left alone, leaving open the possibility that it could be made better (by someone else). Well, it wasn't. By enforcing a class structure with specific method names in the toolkit packages the code becomes more consistent. It should also make it easier for users to derive subclasses
adding in some other features. For example, gprogressbar
, gtimer
, gstackwidget
, ...