HTML as GUI

[mogallin]

This is probably not the perfect category for this post but couldnt find any better.

Anyway i was wondering if its possible to use HTML code for making the GUI of a c++ program or any other language?

What i was thinking of was something that linked a HTML site to the program so for example if someone pressed a link the browser wouldnt load a new page but input a value to the program instead. It musnt nececarily be this way.

I would be grateful for any respenses, and very grateful if they were positiv ones :P

[parad0x13]

You could use just use Java, encoded into your page. Then essentially you would be running a program instead of just a webpage... Unless I'm not getting what your saying at all

[Sebastiani]

>> Anyway i was wondering if its possible to use HTML code for making the GUI of a c++ program or any other language?

Yes, any language can be used as long as a socket API is available (just about every language has one).

[indigo0086]

java or c#, jsp/jsf, asp etc. But you can probably create dynamic web-pages with a good knowledge of HTML with C++ like Sebastiani said, with sockets, just tossing back and forth information between the page and so forth, I don't know if you'll find tools that make it work as smoothly as other languages though. Also you can look into php, since that's what it's made for.

[Mario F.]

What exactly do you want to do mogallin? The general answer is yes, as you've seen already from the answers. But if you provide a more detailed explanation of your plans, you will probably get a more to the point answer including the available technologies you need to study.

[VirtualAce]

It's very easy to create dynamic web pages via ASP.NET and AJAX.

[mogallin]

what i was thinking was if i instead of learning java with GUI or GUI for c++ ( i know a tiny bit c++ and would like to continue larning it) it maybe would be possible to use HTML code for the GUI. So maybe a HTML link could do a input action istead of linking to another page;
<a href="programname.input.'2'"> input 2 </a>
or maybe something like that.

This would be good if i had a program wanting the user to chose between 3 alternatives many times. Mostly to make non-programming-interested friends try the app, since they think command line interfaces are quite boring.

[Mario F.]

I don't suggest you go that route with that type of HTML-C++ integration. It is certainly possible. But hard to develop although there are already some HTML parsing and rendering libraries for C++ integrated in C++ GUI libraries like wxWidgets or Qt. But... if you end up using those libraries, might as well use what they were designed for; and that is C++ GUI development.

If you don't aim at learning C++ or Java, I'd suggest you gave Adobe AIR a shot. It provides programmers with yet another alternative for GUI development and it's a quiet interesting alternative for a few reasons, one of which is its tight web integration. You can run AIR applications standalone or as part of a website.

[mkruk]

the easiest method is writing a webserver for that specific html page, which shouldn't be a big deal if you're familiar with html. The difficult part is, that you'll need a good understanding of the C (or C++) programming language and berkeley sockets. Imho the learning effort is the same like creating a simple GUI using GTK+ (never used Qt or the Win API for GUIs so I can't compare them).