jverzani / gWidgets2

Rewrite of gWidgets
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The gWidgets2 package

The 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:

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.

Why a rewrite of the gWidgets package?