Comparing Shiny with gWidgetsWWW2.rapache

(A guest post by John Verzani)

A few days back the RStudio blog announced Shiny, a new product for easily creating interactive web applications (http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/). I wanted to compare this new framework to one I’ve worked on, gWidgetsWWW2.rapache – a version of the gWidgets API for use with Jeffrey Horner’s rapache module for the Apache web server (available at GitHub). The gWidgets API has a similar aim to make it easy for R users to create interactive applications.

I don’t want to worry here about deployment of apps, just the writing side. The shiny package uses websockets to transfer data back and forth from browser to server. Though this may cause issues with wider deployment, the industrious RStudio folks have a hosting program in beta for internet-wide deployment. For local deployment, no problems as far as I know – as long as you avoid older versions of internet explorer.

Now, Shiny seems well suited for applications where the user can parameterize a resulting graphic, so that was the point of comparison. Peter Dalgaard’s tcltk package ships with a classic demo tkdensity.R. I use that for inspiration below. That GUI allows the user a few selections to modify a density plot of a random sample.
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Rose plot using Deducers ggplot2 plot builder

The (excellent!) LearnR blog had a post today about making a rose plot in
ggplot2.

Following today’s announcement, by Ian Fellows, regarding the release of the new version of Deducer (0.4) offering a strong support for ggplot2 using a GUI plot builder, Ian also sent an e-mail where he shows how to create a rose plot using the new ggplot2 GUI included in the latest version of Deducer. After the template is made, the plot can be generated with 4 clicks of the mouse.

Here is a video tutorial (Ian published) to show how this can be used:

The generated template file is available at:
http://neolab.stat.ucla.edu/cranstats/rose.ggtmpl

I am excited about the work Ian is doing, and hope to see more people publish use cases with Deducer.

ggplot2 plot builder is now on CRAN! (through Deducer 0.4 GUI for R)

Ian fellows, a hard working contributer to the R community (and a cool guy), has announced today the release of Deducer (0.4) to CRAN (scheduled to update in the next day or so).
This major update also includes the release of a new plug-in package (DeducerExtras), containing additional dialogs and functionality.

Following is the e-mail he sent out with all the details and demo videos.

Continue reading “ggplot2 plot builder is now on CRAN! (through Deducer 0.4 GUI for R)”

The new GUI for ggplot2 (using Deducer) – the designer wants your opinion

After discovering that R is expected (this summer) to have a GUI for ggplot2 (through deducer), I later found Ian’s gsoc proposal for this GUI.  Since the system is in it’s early stages of development, Ian has invited people to give comments, input and critique on his plans for the project.

For your convenience (and with Ian’s permission), I am reposting his proposal here. You are welcome to send him feedback by e-mailing him (at: [email protected]), or by leaving a comment here (and I will direct him to your comment).

Continue reading “The new GUI for ggplot2 (using Deducer) – the designer wants your opinion”

R is going to have a GUI to ggplot2! (by the end of this years google-summer-of-code)

I was delighted to see the following e-mail post from Dirk Eddelbuettel regarding the google-summer-of-code R google group:
* * *

Earlier today Google finalised student / mentor pairings and allocations for
the Google Summer of Code 2010 (GSoC 2010). The R Project is happy to
announce that the following students have been accepted:

Colin Rundel, “rgeos – an R wrapper for GEOS”, mentored by Roger Bivand of
the Norges Handelshoyskole, Norway

Ian Fellows, “A GUI for Graphics using ggplot2 and Deducer”, mentored by
Hadley Wickham of Rice University, USA

Chidambaram Annamalai, “rdx – Automatic Differentiation in R”, mentored by
John Nash of University of Ottawa, Canada

Yasuhisa Yoshida, “NoSQL interface for R”, mentored by Dirk Eddelbuettel,
Chicago, USA

Felix Schoenbrodt, “Social Relations Analyses in R”, mentored by Stefan
Schmukle, Universitaet Muenster, Germany

Details about all proposals are on the R Wiki page for the GSoC 2010 at
http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=developers:projects:gsoc2010

The R Project is honoured to have received its highest number of student
allocations yet, and looks forward to an exciting Summer of Code. Please
join me in welcoming our new students.

At this time, I would also like to thank all the other students who have
applied for working with R in this Summer of Code. With a limited number of
available slots, not all proposals can be accepted — but I hope that those
not lucky enough to have been granted a slot will continue to work with R and
towards making contributions within the R world.

I would also like to express my thanks to all other mentors who provided for
a record number of proposals. Without mentors and their project ideas we
would not have a Summer of Code — so hopefully we will see you again next
year.

Regards,

Dirk (acting as R/GSoC 2010 admin)

* * *

From all the projects, the one I am most excited about is:
Ian Fellows, “A GUI for Graphics using ggplot2 and Deducer”, mentored by Hadley Wickham of Rice University, USA

Deducer (text from the website) attempts to be a free easy to use alternative to proprietary data analysis software such as SPSS, JMP, and Minitab. It has a menu system to do common data manipulation and analysis tasks, and an excel-like spreadsheet in which to view and edit data frames. The goal of the project is to two-fold.

  • Provide an intuitive interface so that non-technical users can learn and perform analyses without programming getting in their way.
  • Increase the efficiency of expert R users when performing common tasks by replacing hundreds of keystrokes with a few mouse clicks. Also, as much as possible the GUI should not get in their way if they just want to do some programming.

Deducer is designed to be used with the Java based R console JGR, though it supports a number of other R environments (e.g. Windows RGUI and RTerm).

This combination (of Deducer and ggplot2) might finally provide the bridge to the layman-statistician that some people recently wrote to be one of R’s weak spots (while other bloogers wrote back that this is o.k., still no one refuted that R doesn’t compete with the point-and-click of softwares like SPSS or JMP.)
I came across Ian in the discussion forums, where he provided very kind help to his package “deducer”. Coupled with having Hadley as his mentor, I am very optimistic about the prospects of seeing this project reaching very high standards.
Very exciting development indeed!

Update: Ian’s proposal is available to view here.

p.s: for some intuition about how a GUI for ggplot2 can look like, have a look at this video of Jeroen Ooms’s ggplot2 web interface