The RGtkGlade package

The RGtkGlade package provides limited bindings to the libglade library. This allows one to use glade to interactively create Gtk GUIs, and to instantiate these interfaces in R directly. The callback information specified in the Glade interface can be S code (names of functions or expressions).

Download

The current version is available as a GNU-zipped tar file RGtkGlade_0.1-1.tar.gz

Install

Installation of the package requires the RGtk package. And that package must have been installed using the --clean (or -c) argument, i.e.
 R CMD INSTALL --clean RGtk
in order to create the necessary libRGtk.so library needed by this RGtkExtra package. (If that was not created, please create a symbolic link or copy the RGtk.so file to create libRGtk.so.)

Then, assuming you have libglade on your system,

 R CMD INSTALL RGtkGlade
should produce the installed package.

Running

To use this package within an R session, you will need to make libRGtk.so in <wherever>/RGtk/libs available to the dynamic loader. The simplest way to do this currently is to add this directory to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH setting as in
 setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH  <wherever>/RGtk/libs:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
or
 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<wherever>/RGtk/libs:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}

In the future, all of these issues may be taken care of automatically by R.

Windows

There is currently no version for this package for Windows available. One first needs gtkExtra working on Windows. Mail me to let me know of any interest in having it work on Windows.

Documentation

  • Libglade documentation
  • An introduction to libglade.
  • See the RGtk package
  • FAQ
  • Generating the bindings
    Some notes on mechanism used to generate the bindings.
  • Embedded widgets in the Gtk HTML widget
    A brief description of a very powerful mechanism provided by the Gtk HTML widget to embed arbitrary widgets within it. This allows us to use R as a Java/Javascript-like language to create dynamic pages. This is similar to the SNetscape package
  • History of changes to the package.
  • Examples

    There are currently very few examples.

    Related Packages

  • RGtk
    General R bindings for Gtk, allowing access to Gdk, Gtk and Gnome.
  • RGtkExtra
    Bindings for the gtk+extra library and its classes, including a data grid/sheet that provides the basic display for a spreadsheet,
  • RGtkViewers
    Higher-level R tools/functions using RGtk and RGtkHTML to display different types of data and information. The tools include
    • a simple HTML browser,
    • XML tree viewer,
    • color-scheme browser,
    • relational database viewer,
    • S4 class relationship viewer,
    • Gtk class, signal and property/arg viewer
    R plugin for Gnumeric
    A plugin for the Gnome spreadsheet Gnumeric. We can use RGtk to access and construct GUIs in Gnumeric since it is built using Gtk.
    Rggobi
    An interface from R to GGobi. We can access the Gtk components of GGobi using RGtk. Additionally, GGobi has an extensive plugin mechanism which allows one to write plugins in the S language. One can add GUI components using RGtk. (See examples in the R plugin module for GGobi.)
    SNetscape
    A plugin for Netscape that allows JavaScript code to call S functions and access S objects as well as allowing S to call JavaScript and communicate with other LiveConnect plugins.
    RSPython
    This package provides a mechanism for calling Python functions from R and vice-versa. This is used in the automated generation of the RGtk bindings between R and the C libraries of Gtk, Gnome, etc. We use the parser of the defs files provided by the pygtk interface.

  • Duncan Temple Lang <duncan@research.bell-labs.com>
    Last modified: Mon Dec 2 03:08:29 UTC 2002