RKWard is a transparent front-end to the

R programming language R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners, bioinform ...

, a scripting-language with a strong focus on

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

functions. RKWard tries to combine the power of the R language with the ease of use of commercial

statistical package Statistical software are specialized computer programs for analysis in statistics and econometrics. Open-source * ADaMSoft – a generalized statistical software with data mining algorithms and methods for data management * ADMB – a software ...

s. RKWard is written in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

and although it can run in numerous environments, it was designed for and integrates the

KDE KDE is an international Free software movement, free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-know ...

desktop environment with the

Qt (software) Qt (pronounced "cute") is cross-platform software for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems wit ...

libraries A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

Features

RKWard's features include *Spreadsheet-like data editor *

Syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that are used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colours and fonts according to the category of terms ...

code folding Code or text folding, or less commonly holophrasting, is a feature of some graphical user interfaces that allows the user to selectively hide ("fold") or display ("unfold") parts of a document. This allows the user to manage large amounts of text ...

and

code completion Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the tab ...

*Data import (e.g. SPSS, Stata and CSV) *Plot preview and browsable history *R package management *Workspace browser *GUI dialogs for all kinds of statistics and plots

Interface

RKWard aims to be easy to use, both for people with deep knowledge of R, and for users who, although they have experience in statistics, are not familiar with the language. The application design offers the possibility of using the graphic tools as well as ignoring many of them and using the program as

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...

. It includes a workspace viewer, which gives access to packages, functions and variables loaded by R or imported from other sources. It also has a file viewer, and data set editing windows, display of the contents of the variables, help, command log and HTML output. It also offers components that help in code editing and direct order execution, such as the script window and the R console, where you can enter complete commands or programs as you would in the original R text interface. It provides additional help such as

syntax coloring Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that are used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colours and fonts according to the category of terms ...

documentation of functions while writing, and includes the feature of capturing graphs or emerging dialogs produced by offering additional options for handling, saving and exporting them.

Package Management

The R package management is carried out through a configuration dialog that allows one to, either automatically (because a plug-in requires it) or manually, install new packages from the

repository Repository may refer to: Archives and online databases * Content repository, a database with an associated set of data management tools, allowing application-independent access to the content * Disciplinary repository (or subject repository), an ...

's official project, update existing ones, delete them or upload / download them from the workspace.

Add-ons system

Thanks to its add-ons system RKWard constantly expands the number of functions that can be accessed without writing the code directly. These components allow, from a

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

, instructions to be generated in R for the most common or complex statistical operations. In this way, even without having deep knowledge about the language it is possible to perform advanced data analysis or elaborated graphs. The results of the computations are formatted and presented as

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

, making it possible, with a single

click and drag In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...

, to export tables and graphs to, for example,

office suite Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintings, ...

rk.Teaching

RKTeaching (stylized as rk.Teaching) is a package specially designed for use in teaching and learning statistics, integrating modern packages (such as R2HTML, plyr and ggplot2 among others) as RKWard native outputs. As of 2020, RKTeaching is in version 1.3.0.

References

External links

RKWard homepage'RKWard: A Comprehensive Graphical User Interface and Integrated Development Environment for Statistical Analysis with R', Stefan Rödiger, Thomas Friedrichsmeier, Prasenjit Kapat, Meik Michalke, ''Journal of Statistical Software''
{{KDE Free R (programming language) software Free software programmed in C++ Free statistical software KDE Applications PHP software