Hi, my name is Raymond Camden, and I'm one of the new bloggers here at InsideRIA. I'm was pretty surprised that I was even asked to be here, and I consider it quite an honor, so I hope that I can provide articles of interest to the readers here. It may help a bit if I give a little background about myself and where i come from - development-wise.

I began web development back in the dusty old days of Mosaic. I can still remember using Gopher and how I thought this new web thing seemed quite a bit sexier (if not a heck of a lot slower on the Sun terminal I was using). I picked up an HTML book soon after and discovered what most newbie developers find out pretty quickly: HTML is easy. Good design isn't. Luckily back then you didn't have much to design with so even my web pages looked decent enough.

Then one day an early version of Netscape was released. While I forget the exact version, it was the initial release that supported JavaScript (LiveScript back then, which I still say was a better, less confusing name!) I remember how cool it was to build web pages that actually did something on screen. It was incredibly exciting. Later on I remember playing with DHTML. I built graphic doohicky and doodads, and even a cool slider nicknamed the Stalker that graced the pages of Netscape.com. (Quite an honor in those days.)

And then the it happened - the browser wars. All of a sudden, front end JavaScript development began to be not so fun. I had always been involved in back end development (Perl, and then ColdFusion), but I gradually switched away from almost any client side work.

So that's where I was up until fairly recently. I had become quite adapt at ColdFusion development and was comfortable working there. There was all this buzz about something called Ajax, but frankly after being burned by JavaScript once, I wasn't ready to commit again.

I finally got over my fear and began to play with the Adobe Spry (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry) framework. I was surprised by how easy they made Ajax, and my heart began to warm up to JavaScript once more.

I still feel somewhat new to the JavaScript world, although my old skills are slowly coming back. Many of my posts will focus more on introductory type topics as I will share my learning experiences (both good and bad) as I slowly make my way back to the front end.

Please let me know how I do, and see you on the blog!