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 would like to expand the reach of our work by building simple, wizard-style user interfaces to access our methods, either web-apps like RNAfold or stand-alone applications to analyze private data.
Ideally, we would like the interfaces to do some data checking, to only use FOSS, to run in Mac and Windows environments, and to be able to generate simple charts and graphs that can be output as figures suitable for publication. Also, we like Python because it’s a popular language in the lab and in our research community.
However, we want to be able to develop and release quickly and cheaply. We are lucky to be able to fund one developer in the lab and s/he has to support multiple projects.
There are a lot of groups with the same needs and constraints as us, so it would be useful to be able to develop a consistent long-term strategy for this type of challenge.
Edit I asked for comments on four possible approaches, included below with summary of comments: