RKWard: A Comprehensive Graphical User Interface and Integrated Development Environment for Statistical Analysis withR

Abstract

R is a free open-source implementation of the S statistical computing language and programming environment. The current status of R is a command line driven interface with no advanced cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI), but it includes tools for building such. Over the past years, proprietary and non-proprietary GUI solutions have emerged, based on internal or external tool kits, with different scopes and technological concepts. For example, Rgui.exe and Rgui.app have become the de facto GUI on the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X platforms, respectively, for most users. In this paper we discuss RKWard which aims to be both a comprehensive GUI and an integrated development environment for R. RKWard is based on the KDE software libraries. Statistical procedures and plots are implemented using an extendable plugin architecture based on ECMAScript (JavaScript), R, and XML. RKWard provides an excellent tool to manage different types of data objects; even allowing for seamless editing of certain types. The objective of RKWard is to provide a portable and extensible R interface for both basic and advanced statistical and graphical analysis, while not compromising on flexibility and modularity of the R programming environment itself.Keywords: GUI, integrated development environment, plugin, R. Background and motivationIn mid 1993 Ihaka and Gentleman published initial efforts on the computing language and programming environment R on the s-news mailing list. Ambitions for this project were to 2 RKWard: A Comprehensive GUI and IDE for R develop an S-like language without inheriting memory and performance issues. The source code of R was finally released in 1995, and since 1997 development has evolved under the umbrella of the R Development Core Team (R Development Core Team 2001, 2012aIhaka 1998). R does not include an advanced cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) as known from other statistical software packages. However, R includes tools for building GUIs mainly based on Tcl/Tk (Dalgaard 2001(Dalgaard , 2002. Meanwhile a plethora of R GUIs have emerged (see Grosjean 2010, for a comprehensive list). In 2005 John Fox released version 1.0 of R Commander (Fox 2005, package Rcmdr), which can be considered a milestone in R GUI development; it was the first GUI implementation that was able to make statistical tests, plots and data manipulation easily accessible for R novices. John Fox stated that Rcmdr's target was to provide functionality for basic-statistical courses, though the features have increased over time beyond this (Fox 2005(Fox , 2007. In November 2002 Thomas Friedrichsmeier started the RKWard open-source software project with the goal to create a GUI for R based on KDE (KDE e.V. 2012) and Qt (Nokia Corporation 2012) technologies 1 .The scope of RKWard is deliberately broad, targeting both R novices and experts. For the first group, the aim is to allow any person with knowledge on statistical procedures to start using RKWard for their everyday work without having to learn anything about t...

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