Right tools for a web-based game

[josefgiven]

I've been thinking about making a game for the web which is based partly on an interactive website and partly in a forum, much like this one.

It would be a Risk-style game, where diplomacy between the players would take place on the forums. It would be a very long term, possibly open-ended, game where players would send orders via a web-form to the interactive site every week. The site would then crunch those orders, update the graphical world map, then generate posts for the forum with accounts of the battles between the players.

Over time, I hope to expand the model with a trade system, computer controlled NPC countries, which act without the need for players, and... well, the sky's the limit.

The question is, what would be the best programming language for me to learn to do this? I've been thinking about getting a Java for Dummies book, but I don't know if JavaScript is better. Hell, I don't even know the difference between the two. I'm pretty green when it comes to programming. What say you?

[degsy]

You may want to look into the big forums such as vBulletin and invisionboard.

These boards have many mods/hacks for member points systems.

[oracle128]

You'll probably need to learn PHP, which is the server-side scripting language that features like forums are built in. From then, you could probably add on game functionality to something like the free phpBB. Or you could build your own from scratch.

Java is a programming language. For the kind of thing you're talking about, you won't need to learn it. It's used for interactive Applets and desktop applications. JavaScript is a smaller, less powerful scripting language for adding dynamic functionality to HTML web pages. Even this, I doubt you'd need to use for a turn-based forum game.

Java vs JavaScript (http://www.dannyg.com/ref/javavsjavascript.html)

[josefgiven]

Thank you, folks.

So, PHP, then. Do I need a program in which to build that, or can I just plug away in a text editor?

EDIT: Forget that. I've seen a couple of sites since which say you can just paste .php code into a html document. Notepad it is!

And I suppose the only other thing I need to ask is: can you recommend a decent book to get me started? I learn these sorts of things quickly so long as I get a very clear and jargonless introduction. I picked the basics of a C-based scripting language up fairly quickly a while back with some very well-written help by a friend of mine.

[degsy]

I would recommend sites such as php.net and w3schools.
You will find more info online than you will with a book.

[oracle128]

Book (http://www.peachpit.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0321245652&rl=1)

W3Schools is also good, and you will need to use the php.net manual at some stage, for function references.

Don't forget that, unlike HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which can run only in a browser, server-side scripting languages like PHP need to be processed by a web server like Apache, IIS, or DevPHP (http://devphp.sourceforge.net/).

[josefgiven]

Thank you both again. :)

I am doing very well with w3schools. For the record, I'm not bothering with Apache, because I'm FTPing the .php pages to some webspace I have and running them from there. Seems to be doing fine at the moment.