Before getting into the nuts and bolts of Mozilla programming, let me share some more background.  In 2005 I graduated from the a university in Kentucky with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science.  I participated in a cooperative education program that gave me some helpful on work experience.  I primarily used C++, with a small sampling of Java, VB, Perl, and other languages.  I had almost no experience with JavaScript.  After graduation, I began working part-time Christian ministry on staff at a local church.  A year and a half later I began an additional part-time job - working remotely from Kentucky as a contractor for a small company in Raleigh, North Carolina.

At that time I joined a two-person team (industrial/organization psychologist and software developer) who developed software for military clients to aid in the assessment and selection of certain elite soldiers.  What began as a complicated Excel spreadsheet years prior had evolved into (and outgrown) a Microsoft Access database.  When I joined the team, we were working to separate the front-end from the back-end database, with plans to move the database to a more industrial-strength database.  We also planned to move the application to a client-server model, eventually.

Our lead developer selected the Mozilla platform for designing our client interface.  I was not familiar with XUL at the time, but I was comfortable developing with a proven technology -- a la Firefox and Thunderbird.

In my next post I will begin discuss the benefits of XUL application development.