Sean Davis wrote: > On Wednesday 28 March 2007 06:25, Roger Bivand wrote: > >> On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Hin-Tak Leung wrote: >> >>> Hmm, if all you are interested is reading/writing Excel spreadsheets >>> from R, there are much lighter and easier ways of doing it, than >>> hooking up with openoffice. The Perl people have had >>> Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel for years (and >>> they work quite well, personal experience). Those are tiny >>> (a couple of Mb's?) compared to the size of openoffice. >>> >> I don't think this is the problem here - the proposal says: "Create an >> add-on component that allows a Calc user to let the R environment do >> calculations on data from Calc cells and put the results into the >> spreadsheet again". It feels much more like embedding R in the OO >> spreadsheet and/or elsewhere, which would be similar to using DCOM in >> Excel. There would also be questions about how tightly integrated an >> embedded R should be, how functionality would be provided and documented, >> and how such a setup ought to be administered and maintained. >> >> As RExcel, the structure depends crucially on having joint expertise in >> place to write and maintain the R script glue (dialogues) to provide the >> functionality being added to Calc. Typically, this would be something an >> organisation of some size might need, but it would be unlikely to be a GUI >> for novice R users unwilling to scale the learning curve (a steep learning >> curve, of course, means learn a lot in a short time, hence a good thing!). >> > > There are examples of doing this with Excel, which have been quite > successful. > Here is at least one example (which I post for potential contact > information): > > http://linus.nci.nih.gov/BRB-ArrayTools.html > I feel (without much hard evidence to build the feeling on...) that the main issue is that OOo isn't making it really clear what the preferred embedding/interfacing methods should be. I did look into the related issue of database connectivity at some point; toying with the idea of using oobase or oocalc as a backend for RODBC, but apparently no ODBC interface exists. (The other way around is possible: using oobase as a front end for e.g. mysql via ODBC).
The Windows tools have (D)COM for interfacing to an R server process, and the corresponding OOo interface is something called UNO, but step-by-step instructions for using it appear to be hard to come by. One possible starting point could be to look at the existing language bindings and see whether they inspire a similar set of R bindings. There is some experience around with interfacing issues: RSPerl, RPy, RGtk, the tcltk package, etc. It tends to get somewhat tricky because R's object model differs from that of OO languages like Java and C++, and is closer to Lisp's CLOS. Also, if R's property of being a rapid prototyping language is to be preserved, it is unattractive to blindly wrap C libraries containing functions of 27 arguments each... Digging around, I notice that there is an existing "tcluno" package. This might be made accessible from R's tcltk package. -- O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FAX: (+45) 35327907 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
