There are a lot of reasons why you may want to provide an executable instead of a web app:

- Web applications have a lot of the source public (HTML and JS are visible on any browser). Even with technics of obfuscation everything that's happening on the client's PC can be seen, on an executable it's harder for the average user and even advances user won't see the code you wrote, only the assembly generated. This can lead to security issues, so you need to be more carefull in a web application.

- Browsers are different, something may work in some browser and not in another, even following the standards. Some browsers support WebGL and some not, for example, but it goes to even the basic stuff (like setting the border size of a button).

- Web pages have some limitations. On the client's PC you have a sandboxed environment for security reasons, you can't access the file system unless the user allows it and even there you may encounter some problems accessing to other external devices.

- JavaScript is a non-typed language, for C++ developers it could be a hard transition. It's not a hard language, but the way you code it's really different (imagine using A LOT of function pointers in C++ and ignore some things you know about classes).

There are probably more, but I can't think more right now.

You'll learn most things creating web apps, so don't worry if you don't know the difference between GET and POST right now.

When I started making web apps I used PHP with CodeIgniter for the web services and HTML/CSS/Jquery for the client side. PHP is the language, CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that already manages a lot of things, HTML and CSS are the standards for presentation and JQuery is a framework based on JavaScript.

I've never used other frameworks but there are a lot. I've read that CodeIgniter is kind of outdated now and the "new thing" is Laravel, so maybe you can start with that for the web server. Other PHP frameworks will also work, but I've read that CodeIgniter is one of the simplest for a begginer.

Going out of PHP (it's a really old language, even though it's still being updated) the most popular option currently seems to be Ruby on Rails (Ruby is the language, Rails is a framework). I've done some simple test with it an it looks really powerfull and easy to code.

It's not clear what you wan't to do with your web app/game, but if you're C++ API does not listen and respond to HTTP requests you'll also need a web server (and you probably would, since making an app that does that is not trivial, and you won't find a web hosting that supports your custom web server). For a PHP web server you should use Apache (I always use xampp, it sets up an environment with Apache, MySQL and more). I'm not sure what web servers you need for other languages. Once you have the web services you can execute your C++ executable (http://php.net/manual/es/function.exec.php) and send to the client the json your c++ code generated.

If you want to make a browser game you can find several JS frameworks for games, look at Phaser for example.

I don't know what all the grief about bandwidth and web apps being slow is coming from. This is how the modern world works. If you want to bank you use a web app. If you want to sell stocks and shares, web app. If you want to book a holiday, web app. Pretty much any coperate software that interacts with a back end database, web app.

The modern way of doing this would be to use some kind of framework such as RoR or cakePHP to build out a restful API. The frontend would obviously be done in Javascript (or some fancy new language that compiles to JavaScript).

The modern way of doing this would be to use some kind of framework such as RoR or cakePHP to build out a restful API. The frontend would obviously be done in Javascript (or some fancy new language that compiles to JavaScript).

+1

For what you want to do, whether you use a web page with Javascript or a C++ app, the easiest way for the server to provide the functionality is a simple Restful service that consumes and produces some JSON. The client needs an HTTP library to send the Get, Post, Put, and Delete messages, and the server needs to consume them and return the requested data.

At this point the server code depends completely on the language/web server you are using.

That kind of site makes me sad. Or angry.

All errors are unrecoverable. There is usually no way to resubmit. You cannot bookmark, or at least bookmark easily. Back button is broken.

Prime example hit my team today. We were editing a bug in Jira (a common bug tracking database that relies in the above-mentioned heavily scripted system). Multiple people were involved in researching it. It took about a half hour, maybe 45 minutes, to figure out and update the details. Hit submit. The form vanished and several seconds later there was a popup, "Error communicating with the server." There was no way to resubmit. Opened the page in Chrome's development window while praying it was just inside a hidden element. Nope, it was inside a now-deleted dynamically created JavaScript powered div.

While those JS-powered pages can look pretty slick, they are filled with assumptions that fail horribly in the real world.

Another example, the entire HealthCare.gov site. Everything scripted. Under load people get errors similar to the ones above with no way to resubmit on errors, no way to bookmark their progress, no way to handle anything outside the ideal perfect flow. If there are any errors, any busy servers, and dropped connections, their fancy JavaScript power pages fail spectacularly.

I highly recommend you have a look at Dart.

It's really easy to get into if you have experience with languages like Java and C#. The syntax is similar to those languages.

It has a really powerful HTML manipulation system which works really really well. It's like vanilla JavaScript but actually usable.

It compiles to JavaScript as well so it's guaranteed to run in any modern browser.

http://dartlang.org

Why not get any of the opensource content managenent systems out there (drupal comes to mind, there must be a ton of others) that you can install and will actually already work as the basics of your website, that you can then reskin with your own templates (HTML, Javascript and XML involved, or, in some cases, you get a nice shiny web interface if your reskin is lightweight), and for which you can then write plugins (PHP or whatever kind of language the CMS supports) that will implement your actual web applications functionality?

I guess 80% of what you need you will get out of the box from a cms like drupal, or some already existing extensions or plugins. The rest will still need your work, but at least you don't have to write basic stuff.

List of available CMS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems