'standalone' rattle

Rattle is a decent data-mining utility built on top of GNU R, with one small problem: it is impossible to run outside of the R terminal (e.g. from the shell or a desktop icon/menu).

What this means, on Linux, is that to run Rattle one must start R in a terminal and enter the following commands:

> library(rattle)
Loading required package: pmml
Loading required package: XML
Rattle: Graphical interface for data mining using R.
Version 2.5.3 Copyright (C) 2006-2009 Togaware Pty Ltd.
Type 'rattle()' to shake, rattle, and roll your data.
> rattle()

A Ctrl-D to log out of R is also required.

The big problem (ignoring R's inconsistent handling of stdin/out, which can mostly be solved by using littler) is the R Gtk module starts a separate GUI thread, and quitting R does not do a wait on child threads -- it just kills them.

A workaround to launch rattle from outside of R is to provide a simple wrapper script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'open3'

r_prog = `which R`.chomp

Open3.popen3( "#{r_prog} --interactive --no-save --no-restore --slave" ) do | st
din, stdout, stderr |
stdin.puts "library(rattle)"
stdin.puts "rattle()"
puts stdout.read
end

This runs R and launches rattle(), but leaves an R process open in the background once rattle() has exited.

Adding a q() call to the script merely terminates the Rattle GUI child thread. In addition, rattle provides no indication that it is running:

> ls()
character(0)
> library(rattle)
Loading required package: pmml
Loading required package: XML
Rattle: Graphical interface for data mining using R.
Version 2.5.3 Copyright (C) 2006-2009 Togaware Pty Ltd.
Type 'rattle()' to shake, rattle, and roll your data.
> ls()
[1] "Global_rattleGUI" "crs"
[3] "crv" "on_aboutdialog_response"
[5] "rattleGUI" "suppressRattleWelcome"
[7] "viewdataGUI"
> rattle()
> ls()
[1] "Global_rattleGUI" "crs"
[3] "crv" "on_aboutdialog_response"
[5] "rattleGUI" "suppressRattleWelcome"
[7] "viewdataGUI"
# Use Ctrl-Q to exit the Rattle GUI
> ls()
[1] "Global_rattleGUI" "crs"
[3] "crv" "on_aboutdialog_response"
[5] "rattleGUI" "suppressRattleWelcome"
[7] "viewdataGUI"

Once the Rattle library has loaded, there is no way to tell from within R if the Rattle GUI is running or not. Modifying Rattle to create a variable when the GUI loads successfully, and to remove it when the GUI quites, would undoubtedly fix this.