Submitted by stevej on Thu, 07/21/2011 - 09:16
Posted in
First, I want to say this looks like a terrific environment. I've looked at a number of dataflow-type programs and this is one that seems closest to achieving the right combination of functionality and simplicity by using R as the underlying computational engine and Python for the structural programming.
Having said that, I'm not sure how much time I should devote to learning how to use this for the following reasons:
1. There seems to be very little activity on this site. The forums haven't seen more than a couple of poss in the past year.
2. The documentation is really minimal. In particular, there is only 1 example (and that isn't really explained either.)
3. The fact that it is built on orange is good. But there is little or no documentation on exactly where the orange framework sits with respect to red-r; e.g., can I use orange widgets directly? What is the difference between adding a new red-r widget and a new orange widget? (From my little study of both systems they seem quite different, yet supposedly red-r is built on top of orange, hence my confusion.)
4. The fork from orange means that new developments (or bugfixes) there won't be reflected here. And orange seems like a more active project, certainly better documented. So it seems a shame that the achievements of the red-r group aren't able to piggy-back on the achievements of orange. I understand that this was a design choice but perhaps it should be revisited? What would it take to make red-r something that could work as a type of add-on to orange, or at least could easily incorporate core changes to orange as they occur?
Thanks for your hard work and I much appreciate any insight you can provide.
Steve
Template Repository
The repository did exist. We moved to a Drupal based site and haven't had a chance to update the website to handle these templates yet.
I'm actually working on setting that up now so that other users can submit templates and the community can really start to grow.
We have also integrated the search bar with the templates so that you can call them like widgets and rapidly deploy pipelines.
Unfortunately, we are currently undermanned for the project to be at the scale that other projects are. For the most part, it's just us two developers and a few package submitters (and we really appreciate their contributions!!).
I really appreciate you looking into this project. If you have any suggestions please send them to us. We really like feedback. If you would like to submit any documentation or would like to get tips on making packages for your own purposes please keep posting here so that others can see. We have some examples in the Documentation section for the Red-R Core and the widget API.
Thanks for your comments.
Kyle
Departure From Orange
As far as Orange goes, we have mostly stripped out or changed a lot of the orange code. When last we met with them they were wanting to keep the Example Table class and force everything to inherit from that. We also use a much different PyQt subclass structure, use a different signal manager structure, have a different mechanism for handling signal compatibility, and separated widget instances form the icons that represent them.
Pretty much, modifications or changes to Orange would be too different to port to Red-R to change anything. That said, you can't use Orange widgets or packages in Red-R directly. Thought, depending on the design of the Orange widgets, it might be possible to port them to Red-R without much trouble.
We are working on documentation and have put on the website a documentation section made using Sphinx https://red-r.org/documentation. If you have some suggestions for what you would like to see for documentation, we would love to know what our users want.
Thanks for the comments
Kyle
Red-R stands on its own
Thanks for clarifying that. So Red-R is pretty much fully decoupled from orange.
Which makes it even more important to have a few more examples available. I don't want to sound demanding; I realize the developers are doing all they can, but perhaps some users could share? As I said above, one thing that makes me hesitate to invest much time in Red-R is that there doesn't seem to be much of a user community, but perhaps they just don't participate in the forums. Surely there must be more going on out there than one can see by looking at this site. It would be great to have some references to projects that use Red-R, or to have examples contributed by those users available on the site.
User Examples
I am working right now on an interface to share examples and templates with other users. I think one problem for sharing data and examples on my side is that almost all of the data that I work with is confidential. I take your point though, and will try to be better about putting up use examples when I can. I think, unfortunately, that this will generally be limited to examples from packages that I am testing.
Thanks for the post.
Kyle
user examples
I came across this document, don't know the date, but it's a nice presentation on Red-R (would be good to put on this site.) http://press.teleinteractive.net/media/blogs/oss/10.10.05%20-%20R%20user...
One puzzling thing is that it shows a screenshot of a web page labelled as "Community Repository -- Templates" with a very interesting list of contributions including Neural Networks, Splines, etc. The url is https://red-r.org/documentation/templates. Strangely, that url now leads to a "page not found" page from the red-r.org web server. Did this page really exist? Or was it just a mock-up of some hoped-for future repository?
In any case, I appreciate the great work you've done and look forward to future developments.
Steve
user examples
Hi Steve
Thanks for all your comments and observations.
At this stage I am a mere spectator to Red-R. So in turn I will be classified as an "inactive"?? community member. But it will change in time.
It seems that people (like me) doing stats, number crunching, data mining will revert to older "faster" habits when we do not find a way to do this faster (even if a faster way by means of Red-R exists but documentation lacks a bit)
I am of the opinion that development is quite active. The development team quickly tried to solve my error and replied very quickly (Although they are only 2 devs).
So before I can climb in with everything, I am waiting for the next release (or until I have a vanilla and dev environment set up on virtual machines to test the installers). That will be my first contribution to the community and then writing some documentation of code and how to's is the best way to dig in and getting dirty. Understanding the inner workings always help with speeding up a collaborative development environment for new community / dev members.
In the end if you watch this space in the next two to three months (depending when I move into my new place and move out of the boxes), I would gladly post examples, and how to's. My approach will be trial and error (I might need to sensor the data and summaries due to the nature of my work ) At least I will document the processes and post it online :)
Hope everybody is as excited as me to get deep dirty with Red-R.
Kind Regards
PS - Watch this space