I'm looking for suggestions on how to go about building an application that uses R for analytics, table generation, and plotting. What I have in mind is an application that:

• displays various data tables in different tabs, somewhat like in Excel, and the columns should be sortable by clicking.
• takes user input parameters in some dialog windows.
• displays plots dynamically (i.e. user-input-dependent) either in a tab or in a new pop-up window/frame

Note that I am not talking about a general-purpose fron-end/GUI for exploring data with R (like say Rattle), but a specific application. Some questions I'd like to see addressed are:

• Is an entirely R-based approach even possible ( on Windows ) ? The following passage from the Rattle article in R-Journal intrigues me:

It is interesting to note that the first implementation of Rattle actually used Python for implementing the callbacks and R for the statistics, using rpy. The release of RGtk2 allowed the interface el- ements of Rattle to be written directly in R so that Rattle is a fully R-based application

• If it's better to use another language for the GUI part, which language is best suited for this? I'm looking for a language where it's relatively "painless" to build the GUI, and that also integrates very well with R. From this StackOverflow question How should I do rapid GUI development for R and Octave methods (possibly with Python)? I see that Python + PyQt4 + QtDesigner + RPy2 seems to be the best combo. Is that the consensus ?

• Anyone have pointers to specific (open source) applications of the type I describe, as examples that I can learn from?