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 What You Need To Know Before Going Further In order to create GUI interfaces for our RPG programs, we have to learn to speak the languages that GUI understands. For instance, if a programmer wanted to write a standard 5250 green screen front-end, they would need to understand DDS and display files. In order to create GUI interfaces, we need to understand HTML, CSS, Java Script, & Ajax.
Dont be overwhelmed by the thought of learning several new languages, they are fairly simple. But you'll need to have an idea of them as we move forward. You don't have to be an expert in this stuff, a general idea of what each does is good enough to get thru the examples presented in this tutorial. This will allow you to look at the code examples provided, and be able to make sense out of what is happening. Also, we're about to explore why implementing a GUI interface seems so difficult. To understand the challenges of implementing a GUI interface, you need to understand how web pages and browsers work, so you can see how they behave differently than green screens. Then the challenges of implementing a GUI interface becomes apparant.
Fortunately, there is an excellent web-site called W3Schools where you can get up to speed on these topics quickly. It's located at http://www.w3schools.com/ . This site has wonderful interactive tutorials, where you can tinker with the code and see the changes in real-time. They offer a multitude of different tutorials, but the ones you need to be concerned with now are:
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