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

[Jason S. Iacovoni]

On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Michael Lawrence
<lawrence.michael at gene.com>wrote:

> 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.
>
>

Sounds great, will definitely want to use qtpaint and cranvas as well once
the underlying nuts and bolts are in place.


>
>> 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"..
>

Ok, my bad. I now see that there are 2 different projects. I think my brain
never processed the 2 different spellings. Thanks.


>
>
>>  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.
>
>
Definitely important. The whole goal of Qt has been to be cross platform.
Also a very strong advantage to R, so I praise the people working on this
and wish them success. And congrats to those that made it possible on Mac,
I have never found it easy to build my Qt libs and apps on Mac.


>
>
>> 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.
>
>

Accelerated aging only applies to the parents, not the kids. While you are
getting older faster, your kids only appear to you to be aging faster. I do
not think I will let this coding project go that long. Thanks for your
replies and I will get started on porting my stuff using qtbase.

And I might as well add that I feel like I owe you an enormous thanks for
all your work on all the packages I use, from IRanges to rtracklayer, as
well as the Qt-based packages. It has been a steep learning curve, but we
are well underway now processing our Chip-seq data in R. When I started
these projects about 10 years ago, none of this infrastructure was in place.

Michael
>
> Thanks
>> jiaco
>>
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>>
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>>
>
>


-- 
Jason S. Iacovoni
Bioinformatic Plateau
05.61.32.56.18
INSERM / UNIVERSITE PAUL SABATIER UMR 1048
Institut des Maladies Métaboliques et Cardiovasculaires (I2MC)
Building L4, Room 106
1 avenue Jean Poulhès - BP 84225
31432 Toulouse Cedex 4
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