R is an absolutely amazing statistical programming system. The more I work with it, the more impressed I become with what it can do. With the packages and tools it provides, I can scrape the web, manage databases, and perform analysis all from one platform. Once you get passed the initial learning curve it saves time and money. However, it sorely lacks a group of solid IDEs. By solid, I mean an IDE that has an object browser and debugging facilities.

Thus, I was initially excited by REvolution Computing’s Visual Studio based IDE, but they make it difficult to try the software and their lag time in returning questions gave me cold feet.

After trying several editors and quasi-IDE’s, I chose eclipse for several reasons:

• It’s cross-platform and doesn’t install anything on windows.
• Coupled with the Stat ET plug-in, it has an excellent object browser.
• I can program C++, PHP, and Python scripts using the same IDE.

Installing Eclipse for the first time can be a time consuming process and I was skeptical that it would be worth it, but now that it’s done, I’m thrilled.

Here a pic of it’s object browser:

A pic of the entire editor (click to see full fize):

Resources:

For trouble shooting, rjava issue:

http://www.walware.de/it/statet/installation.mframe

For IN-DEPTH tutorial:

http://www.splusbook.com/Rintro/R_Eclipse_StatET.pdf

Gotchas:

On windows, make sure you have your path variables setup properly, else you may have issues. Vista can also be a pain, you may have to give administrator rights to Rcmd to make it run properly or allow users full control.

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