StatET: Tooling for the R language

Sunday, June 5, 2016 - 05:28 by Tobias Verbeke

Basics

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the community. Please login and add your feedback in the comments section.

Project

Eclipse StatET: Tooling for the R language

Parent Project

Eclipse Tools Project

Proposal State

Created

Background

This project is active since 2004; a number of members of the Eclipse Science Working Group demonstrated a strong interest in the project and the project could be useful to other projects that require integration with the R language.

Scope

StatET provides an Eclipse-based integrated development environment for the R language and in order to do so also develops components for the integration of R and Java. All typical views and editors required for an R IDE are in scope. Other statistical programming languages are out of scope for this project.

Description

StatET is an Eclipse-based IDE for R.

It offers a set of mature tools for R coding and package building. This includes

a fully integrated R console
R script editors
an integrated R Graphics view
an object browser to explore the objects R has in memory
an integrated R Help system
functionality to interact with multiple local and remote installations of R
a visual debugger for R
editors and document processing support for Sweave/knitr and Rmarkdown documents
support for running R CMD tools as External launch configurations
etc.

Licenses

Eclipse Public License 1.0

Legal Issues

Regarding trademarks: the project has always been known as StatET, but no formal trademark has been registered.

Regarding the license of the code: the majority of the code has been licensed under EPL v1.0. Minor parts are licensed under Apache 2.0 and under LGPL, since these were based on (and extend) preexisting code licensed under these licenses. As far as we know, all dependencies of the project have licenses that are accepted for Eclipse Science Working group projects.

R is an exempt prerequisite: it is licensed under GPLv2 or GPLv3 and will not be distributed with StatET.

Main Modules:

ECommons (Shared Packages)

EPL

StatET-R

EPL

DocMLET (TeX and Wikitext/Commonmark)

EPL

StatET-Redocs

EPL

StatET-RTM

EPL

EUtils (AutoRun, AutoNature, YAML)

EPL

RJ-Core: Data, Server, Client

EPL+LGPL (dual license)

RJ-Core: R packages (rj, rj.gd)

LGPL

RJ-EClient

EPL

RJ-Servi

EPL, ASL

ASL = contains a modified version of Apache Commons Pool, I guess it can be replaced by the latest version of Commons Pool as separated dependency.

RJ-EClient

EPL

Dependencies:

Eclipse Platform, JDT, EMF, Mylyn

EPL

Apache Commons Pool, DBCP, Primitives

ASL

Apache Derby

ASL

Apache Lucene Core, Analysis, QueryParser, Highlighter

ASL

with additions to Highlighter

SnakeYAML

ASL

with additions (Custom(izable) YAML scanner CScannerImpl)

Texlipse

EPL

with additions

LGPL (API)

Why Here?

StatET is currently the most powerful and flexible environment for doing professional R development. It is entirely based on Eclipse technology and therefore naturally fits with hosting at the Eclipse Foundation.

Future Work

Functionality expected to be added:

improve the debugger functionality (better step-in, step-out behaviour)
improve graphics device (line endings)
auto-import of R projects (following recently added functionality in Neon)
support of reference classes in the editors, object browser etc.
copy/paste functionality from data viewers
add profiler, memory profiler
code coverage tooling based on participation in the R Consortium Code Coverage working group

Community building:

regular presentations of the project status at Eclipse conferences
series of blog posts to cover all current functionality (targeting both channels in the Eclipse community and channels in the R community)
tutorials at R conferences and statistics conferences (e.g. UseR!2017 in Brussels, Belgium)

Project Scheduling

initial contribution: within one month after acceptance of the proposal
first build: within one and a half month after acceptance of the proposal
first release: within two months after acceptance of the proposal

People

Project Leads

Stephan Wahlbrink

Tobias Verbeke

Committers

Stephan Wahlbrink

Frederick Michielssen

Jonas Van Malder

Tobias Verbeke

Interested Parties

Science Working Group
ChemClipse project
Airbus

Source Code

Initial Contribution

All code is hosted on Github (https://github.com/walware). Copyright holders are Stephan Wahlbrink and Open Analytics NV. Both companies are involved in the transfer of the code and will continue to be involved in the development once the code is hosted by the Eclipse Foundation. The user community is active on project mailing list (see http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/mailman/listinfo/statet-user).

Source Repository Type

Git

Source Repositories

https://github.com/walware