Desktop GUI Programming - How do I understand it from a Web Developers\Frontend Designers perspective?

When I develop applications for the web, I usually have the html for the layout, the css for the looks, the javascript (or css3 if supported) for the fancy animations and a server-side scripting language (php, python, ruby) to do the database, CRUD and calculations stuff.

I recently had an idea for a standalone desktop application. I've spent some time looking around on numerous sites to get a basic understanding on how it would work, but I think the only thing I understood was that it does not work like I am used to.

My questions at this point are the following:

1) How does the interaction between Application an开发者_高级运维d Frontend (design) work? Is it like html/css in which you "inject" data and get responses via actions (buttons, links, forms etc.) or is it different?

2) Specificly, if I'd develop with c++, how do I get from a console output to a GUI, and how do can I do "fancy stuff" (so to say) like I do with jquery, for example?

3) I took a look at both Flex and Titanium. If I understand correctly, they offer the possibility to publish web applications written in html/css and either AS3, Flex or Python/Ruby to the desktop. But are they "good"? (if you pardon this silly question, I hope you understand what I mean :D )

I'm sorry if I misunderstood everything terribly, have mercy with my ignorance :)

EDIT 13/Jul/2011: I'm particularly confused about the basic structure. Is it like MVC?

---

well if your app is to be data-centric , I would probably go with Flex. It is very powerful if you want to make RIA(rich internet applications) or desktop apps via adobe AIR. And, since you already are comfortable with designing websites via a markup language you will like MXML (though you can bypass that and program entirely in AS3, as it just compiles the mxml into AS3). You may also continue to use CSS style sheets or other various skinning techniques to style your app. Air will allow you to communicate with the client through a variety of protocols and both manipulate and store it on the client side.The AS3 compiles to a .SWF file and is then held in an HTML "wrapper", but I believe it does support embedding of html.

Hope that is what you were looking for!