iWidgets - general framework for building GUI elements in R
Simon Urbanek

One of the major hurdles for new users to use R is the need to be
acquainted with the underlying language to a certain degree even for
seemingly simple tasks. The available graphical user interfaces
(GUIs) support the user in the use of the console and graphics, but
provide very little to enhance the GUI from R. The idea of iWidgets
is to provide GUI elements that can be created using R thus giving
the user the possibility of hiding complex functionality behind a
point-and-click interface and thus making it available to much
broader audience. Unlike other attempts that expose the interface of
specific toolkit such as tcltk, iWidgets were designed to be
independent of both the platform and underlying toolkit. Therefore
the developer doesn't need to cope or be familiar with the
peculiarities of a particular toolkit. This allows the iWidgets
framework to be implemented differently on each platform, while
exposing identical functionality. The current implementation uses
Java and is platform independent, but other implementations are being
developed. In this talk we will present the iWidgets framework along
with practical examples of its use, including complex applications.