[RQt-devel] General question about the future of Qt and R/bioconductor

[Michael Lawrence]

Hi Jason,


On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 12:51 AM, Jason S. Iacovoni <jason.iacovoni at inserm.fr
> wrote:

> Dear List
>
> I have previously developed a lot of GUIs for my bioinformatics programs
> using Qt (in C++). But nowadays, I find I spend most of my time in R. Thus
> I was initially quite excited when I found out about visnab, ggobi,
> exploRase and qtbase. Before I start porting my library into R, I want to
> know what exactly is the planned future for qtbase. While I understand that
> SMOKE does a lot of the work bringing Qt into R, is it possible that this
> package will become abandoned in the future?
>


The qtbase package is not abandoned. It's just fairly mature. I was working
last week on Qt 5 support, but it turns out that Smoke just isn't ready.
The cranvas project is actively developing on top of qtbase and qtpaint.


>
> From my googling and list reading, it seems that visnab is not active
>

visnab has been on the back burner as Tengfei worked on ggbio and other
things for his thesis. The good news is that his new job is likely to
support continued development of the software. Actually, he fixed a bunch
of bugs in visnab last week.


> and that ggobi is mentioned as the current project.
>

I think you mean the anagram "ggbio"..


> But in looking at exploRase, which imports rggobi, it appears to use Gtk2
> and not Qt.
>

exploRase is my PhD project which some day might be reimplemented using
cranvas or something web-based. The GGobi/rggobi project is mostly in "end
of life mode" though. RGtk2 is still very much maintained and supported.

At the same time, I see that getting a Windows package for qtbase is moving
> forward. But this particular list seems very quiet, almost too quiet, so I
> am hesitant.
>
>
Once there is a Windows version, things may be more active. So much is
being done on the web these days when it comes to GUIs, but there is still
a niche for the desktop.



> In any event, I am very confused about the present and the future of
> qtbase as the library looks perfectly suitable for me to port my C++/Qt
> code into R. But I would hate to get started on this only to find that
> developers are moving off to other GUI toolkits and find that my library
> depends on an abandoned project.
>
>
At least for Linux and Mac, you should expect qtbase and qtpaint to be
maintained and further developed into the foreseeable future.


> Finally, I seem to be finding myself learning loads of packages that list
> Michael Lawrence as an author. Is this really one single person? Are there
> clones available for hire?
>
>
The closest thing to my clone is still 8 years old. Have not yet found a
way to accelerate aging.

Michael

Thanks
> jiaco
>
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