RwxWidgets

22 July 2008

The RwxWidgets package provides an R-language interface to the wxWidgets GUI toolkit. This allows users of R to create GUIs using this toolkit and to specify R functions as callbacks for the different events that users can generate. The wxWidgets toolkit is a cross-platform, native toolkit in that it can be used on all major platforms and uses the native look-and-feel of each of those platforms.

wxWidgets provides the usual set of widgets (or interface components) such as buttons, menus, radio buttons, dialogs, sliders, etc. Additionally, it provides higher-level components such as an HTML display widget, a (data) grid similar to a spreadsheet table layout of cells, and so on. The HTML widget is quite customizable (like the gtkHTML widget) in that allows us to provide customized tag handlers, dynamically embed arbitrary widgets within the document display, control image and document download, all within R.

The current state of the interface is a manually generated collection of R functions and associated C++ routines dynamically loaded into R that provide access

to creating instances of wxWidgets objects,
to dynamically connecting and disconnecting event handlers or callbacks
add R functions as tag handlers for HTML documents,
embed widgets within an HTML document.

This current interface is merely a proof of concept of important aspects of the wxWidgets facilities. To complete this interface, we seek a mechanism to automate the bindings to the other classes and their methods. Our approach is to develop and use the RGCCTranslationUnit package to do this. This allows us to read C/C++ code into R via an intermediate representation and then generate interfaces to the data structures, classes and routines defined in that code.

We hope to have the initial version of this interface completed in the next few weeks. We have a functioning R graphics device that uses wxWidgets and this allows us to embed a graphics device within wxWidgets GUI, including within scrolled windows, notebooks, HTML documents, etc. This is available from RwxDevice and is similar in spirit to the gtkDevice package.

Documentation

Annotated examples Example code and tests The wxWidgets class documentation This serves as the real documentation for the functions that interface to the wxWidgets methods in the C++ classes. Introduction to the RwxWidgets interface HTML parser handlers, etc. FAQ Additional helpful references Screen Shots
Example code and tests The wxWidgets class documentation This serves as the real documentation for the functions that interface to the wxWidgets methods in the C++ classes. Introduction to the RwxWidgets interface HTML parser handlers, etc. FAQ Additional helpful references Screen Shots
The wxWidgets class documentation This serves as the real documentation for the functions that interface to the wxWidgets methods in the C++ classes. Introduction to the RwxWidgets interface HTML parser handlers, etc. FAQ Additional helpful references Screen Shots: This serves as the real documentation for the functions that interface to the wxWidgets methods in the C++ classes.
Introduction to the RwxWidgets interface HTML parser handlers, etc. FAQ Additional helpful references Screen Shots
HTML parser handlers, etc. FAQ Additional helpful references Screen Shots
FAQ Additional helpful references Screen Shots
Additional helpful references Screen Shots
Screen Shots

Binding Generation

Duncan Temple Lang <duncan@wald.ucdavis.edu>

Last modified: Sun Mar 11 12:29:49 PDT 2007