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> Since server-side JS didn't exist yet, I'm being petty, but serverside JS did exist before node (e.g. Narwhal, which I believe is where jsgi and a lot of the

> Since server-side JS didn't exist yet, I'm being petty, but serverside JS did exist before node (e.g. Narwhal, which I believe is where jsgi and a lot of the commonjs stuff originated)

pawelk 9y ago
There was also Rhino in the Java land (I remember working with Helma before Node came out), JScript on IIS, some projects embedding SpiderMonkey. I think node.js finally made server-side JS take off because 1) it was based on V8 which was the new, performance-oriented JS engine powering Chrome, and 2) it was self-contained (i.e. didn't rely on Java on one hand, wasn't just a scripting layer of something larger on the other).
- jdc0589 9y ago
  > some projects embedding SpiderMonkey yea, I remember the woes of building CouchDB from source....about half the issues generally seemed to be SpiderMonkey related.
  - pawelk 9y ago
    On the other hand you could use E4X in CouchDB views, which was almost like JSX, but native.
icedchai 9y ago
Server side JS is older than that. It existed over 20 years ago. Does anyone remember Netscape Livewire? It was basically "ASP-style" server-side javascript that ran on Netscape's "Enterprise" web server. It was a little unstable, but pretty advanced for the time (had DB connectivity, etc.)
- int_19h 9y ago
  While we're at it, ASP itself had JavaScript (well, JScript, technically) support alongside VBScript, out of the box. It wasn't particularly popular, probably because anyone doing ASP was likely to be using the rest of MS stack - and that meant VB for desktop LOB apps, usually.