Oleg,
On Feb 19, 2009, at 9:47 , Sklyar, Oleg (London) wrote:
Simon,
I would not like to take it offline as I disagree with your points
and think it is fair to let other users know why.
I didn't say offline, I said other thread, since this is not really
about GSOC so I think this is getting OT ...
To make it clear first, I am most interested in 2D, not 3D plots,
and rgobbi is not a good enough solution, unfortunately.
1) I spent loads of time looking for good, if any at all,
interactive graphics packages for R. There are hardly many, and
apart from rgl there are no good ones as I see it.
Maybe we are talking about entirely different things here - rgl is not
interactive graphics at all - it is essentially a 3d renderer/viewer,
not a data analytic tool [although it can be (ab)used as a very
limited one for very specific tasks] - see literature on interactive
graphics ...
I do accept that this can be subjective, but I think many people
will share my opinion.
2) With respect to iplots:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/iplots/index.html states:
Version: 1.1-3
Depends: R (≥ 1.5.0), methods, rJava (≥ 0.5-0)
http://www.rosuda.org/iplots/ states:
News:
* 2007/08/07 Released iplots_1.1-1 on CRAN...
There might be version 3 available somewhere, but it is not obvious
where and the above one is Java based. I have tried the above
version about 4 months ago -- it was slow, unstable and did not have
any support for time axis at all. If I find it, I will give it a try
and will be able to post corresponding comments.
<free-software-author's rant>
At the very least it is polite to report any such issues (with
details) to the authors. Comments like "X is bad, slow and crashes"
are completely useless since they are unsubstantiated claims that
don't help in creating better software -- neither are they helpful as
a starting point for creating new software. If you want to be of any
use to the community you should be more specific as of what you are
talking about, what are the data examples etc. and talk to the authors.
</free-software-author's rant>
Given your comments I suspect you have very specific ideas of use, but
we can only know when you tell us. In general, Java graphics are not
slow, in fact they are often faster than conventional "native"
implementations and are far more flexible.
[[split off to Java for graphics thread if you wish]]
As for iPlots, the development has shifted a while ago from the 'old'
iPlots to the new ones which are in development stage (as I said they
are announced for the useR! conference). My point was not about
telling you to use a specific software, it was rather about making you
aware of the fact that what you describe already exists (ggobi
definitely is IG in GTK) and/or is worked on (iPlots 3.0) with
possibly better approach.
I do fully support a GSOC proposal for interactive graphics software,
it's just I think your formulation included some unnecessarily
restricting details and personal opinions as well as misunderstandings
as of what interactive graphics are. If we get that right, I think
it's a great opportunity.
[[only this is really for the GSOC thread]]
2) rggobi is not a solution for 2D graphics at all and this is what
is missing in R. I would not mention rgobbi myself having had no
look at it first. However, if somebody works on interactive 2D
plots, there is no reason why this person should think of 3D as well
to have all in one framework.
I'll let ggobi authors respond to that, but ggobi is not about 3d at
all - in fact 3d is just a very small part of ggobi. Again, I suspect
it's not really interactive graphics that you have in mind and/or you
are not familiar with it ...
[[split off to ggobi thread]]
3) I have a prototype using gtkdatabox for very fast interactive
plots in R using GTK, but it is limited by the capabilities of the
gtkdatabox widget, not that of R or GTK as such.
I don't know about your prototype, so I cannot really comment on that,
but gtkdatabox is not IG, either.
I do think there is a need for an interactive graphics package for R.
I do completely agree with that, but interactive means it satisfies
basic requirements on IG such as the availability of selection,
highlighting, queries, interactive change of parameters etc. This is
not about 2d/3d clouds at all - that we have for decades already. Also
this is not about "hacks" to glue on interactivity to existing
graphics systems with a chewing gum. We need a versatile (possible
extensible) set of interactive statistical plots -- at least that's
what our experience shows.
Cheers,
Simon
-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Urbanek [mailto:simon.urba...@r-project.org]
Sent: 19 February 2009 14:34
To: Sklyar, Oleg (London)
Cc: Friedrich Leisch; r-devel@r-project.org;
manuel.eugs...@stat.uni-muenchen.de
Subject: Re: [Rd] Google Summer of Code 2009
On Feb 19, 2009, at 6:38 , Sklyar, Oleg (London) wrote:
Two ideas:
1) A library for interactive plots in R
R lacks functionality that would allow displaying of interactive
plots with two distinct functionalities: zooming and panning. This
functionality is extremely important for the analysis of
large, high
frequency, data sets spanning over large ranges (in time as well).
The functionality should acknowledge Axis methods in callbacks on
rescale (so that it could be extended to user-specific classes for
axis generation) and should have a native C interface to R
(i.e. no
Java, but such cross platform widgets like GTK or QT or anything
similar that does not require heavy-weight add-ons). GTK has been
used successfully from within R in many applications (RGtk,
rgobby,
EBImage etc) on both *nix and Windows, and thus could be a
preferential option, it is also extremely easy to integrate
into R.
The existing tools (e.g. iplots) are slow, unstable and
lack support
for time/date plots (or actually any non-standard axes) and
they are
all Java. We are looking into stanard xy-plots as well as
image and
3D plots. Obviously one can think of further interactivity,
but this
would be too much for the Summer of Code project. A good prototype
would already be a step forward.
If primitive 3d scatterplot interactivity is all you want, go with
rggobi. It's GTK and has all this already and much more. However,
ggobi also shows why GTK is not a good choice for general
interactive
graphics toolkit - it [GTK] is slow and lacks reasonable graphics
support. OpenGL is IMHO a better way to go since IG don't really
leverage any of the widgets (you get them for free via R widgets
packages anyway) and OpenGL gives you excellent speed, alpha-support
and anti-aliasing etc.
As you can imagine I don't agree with most of your statements above
and I'm happy to discuss them in a separate thread. Just as an aside
iPlots 3.0 (announced for useR!/DSC) are no longer Java based
and have
a native C interface.
Cheers,
S
2) Cross platform GUI debugger, preferably further Eclipse
integration (beyond StatET capabilities)
Tibco has recently released the S+ workbench for eclipse
which has a
reasonable support for non-command line debugging. In the R
community, the StatET eclipse plugin mimics a lot of code
development functionality of S+ workbench, but has poor
support for
in-line execution of R sessions in eclipse and does not have
debugging capabilities. Supporting this project further, or
developing a GUI debugger independent of eclipse, are both
acceptable options. The debugger should allow breakpoints,
variable
views etc.
For both of the above, our interest is mostly on the Linux
side, but
one should look into cross-platform solutions.
Regards,
Oleg
Dr Oleg Sklyar
Research Technologist
AHL / Man Investments Ltd
+44 (0)20 7144 3107
oskl...@maninvestments.com
-----Original Message-----
From: r-devel-boun...@r-project.org
[mailto:r-devel-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of
Friedrich Leisch
Sent: 18 February 2009 22:54
To: r-devel@r-project.org
Cc: manuel.eugs...@stat.uni-muenchen.de
Subject: [Rd] Google Summer of Code 2009
Hi,
in approximately one months time mentoring institutions can propose
projects for the Google Summer of Code 2009, see
http://code.google.com/soc/
Last year the R Foundation succesfully participated with 4
projects,
see http://www.r-project.org/SoC08/ for details. We want to
participate again this year. Our project proposals will be
managed by
Manuel Eugster (email address in CC). Manuel is one of my PhD
students
and mentored the Roxygen project last year. This mail is mainly
intended to make you aware of the program, Manuel will send a
followup
email with more technical details in the next days.
In this phase we are looking for potential mentors who can offer
interesting projects to students. I don't think that we will get
much
more than 4-6 projects, so don't be disappointed if you propose
something and don't get selected.
There are two selection steps involved: (a) The R Foundation has to
compile an official "ideas list" of projects, for which
students can
apply. Last year we had 8 of those. After that, we (b) get
a certain
number of slots from Google (4 last year) and all
prospective project
mentors can vote on which projects actually get funding.
Currently we are looking for good ideas for phase (a). I give no
guarantees that all ideas will get on our official ideas
list, what
we
pick depends on the number of submissions and topics,
respectively.
We
want to make sure to have a broad range of themes, it is unlikely,
that we will, e.g., pick 10 database projects. Also keep
in mind that
students have only three months time. This is not a
research exercise
for the students, you should have a rough idea what needs
to be done.
Last year we had a majority of "infrastructure projects",
and only
few
with focus on statistical algorithms. We got a lot of
applications
for
the latter, so don't hesitate to formulate projects in that
direction. Important infrastructure may get precedence over
specialized algorithms, though, because the whole community can
benfit
from those. But that will be a decision in phase (b), and
we are not
there yet.
Please don't send any ideas to me right now, wait for the above
mentioned email by Manuel on the technical details for idea
submission.
Best,
Fritz
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
---------
Prof. Dr. Friedrich Leisch
Institut für Statistik Tel: (+49 89)
2180 3165
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Fax: (+49 89)
2180 5308
Ludwigstraße 33
D-80539 München
http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch
--------------------------------------------------------------
---------
Journal Computational Statistics --- http://www.springer.com/180
Münchner R Kurse --- http://www.statistik.lmu.de/R
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