That's very interesting, but as you know Java installation can be quite
problematic. (It looks like the current Sun JVM 1.4.2_03 has several
issues, including not working with the R search engine, and a warning on
mozilla.org about its Windows plugin.)
I'm aware of the problems caused by various JVM versions. Although our Java code is not directly affected, we plan to supply an optional installer (for Windows) which will take care of the JVM and install an appropriate private JRE if necessary.
We bundled a version of Tcl/Tk with the R Windows binary to try to avoid
compatibility issues, and even then I would prefer a native Windows
solution for this one.
I'm definitely not against a native editor. I don't want to discourage Chris, especially if he has already a working prototype. To the contrary - one implicit point of my post was that we should stay in contact, since we have implemented an editor as well and thought about the interface and the features, so we could exchange our experiences.
I also wanted to say that we may want to talk about bigger scope here. My concern is that the number of scattered GUIs for various platforms is increasing and each GUI has own interfaces, inconsistent with others, making it hard to switch between GUIs. If one wants to add functionality to the 'preferred' GUI then others don't have any benefit from the extension. A platform-independent GUI would solve this problem, since an improvement would affect all platforms. Furthermore using Java, it is possible to offer the quite powerful Java widget set to R users, seamlessly integrated into the GUI, thus allowing users to extend the GUI as they please - using R. (Besides, users could even integrate their own Java code with R, but that's another story...). By now we also have an own, working Java graphics device allowing us to achieve really tight integration of all aspects of R. I don't claim that this should replace the Windows GUI, but I think it might be an interesting, flexible alternative. I know that the project is all but easy, nevertheless I believe that we got quite far by now.
Simon
--- Simon Urbanek Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis University of Augsburg Universitätsstr. 14 86135 Augsburg Germany
Tel: +49-821-598-2236 Fax: +49-821-598-2200
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://simon.urbanek.info
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