How should I do rapid GUI development for R and Octave methods (possibly with Python)?

Question

We are a medium-sized academic research lab whose main outputs are new statistical methods for analyzing large datasets. We generally develop in R and MATLAB/Octave.

We

Answer 1

Why not continue to develop directly in R? There are a number of packages that allow you to develop GUIs (gWidgets RGtk, tcl/tk, RQt, Rwxwidgets, rjava) or web applications.