Had I started App Maker with the web platform and Node of today, I would have definitely designed things to use standard web APIs, Node on the server, and commo

Had I started App Maker with the web platform and Node of today, I would have definitely designed things to use standard web APIs, Node on the server, and common tools for things like IO and data. Apps would have mostly a set of JS modules talking to generic enough backends to be portable. Ideally there would just be an eject button that would give you either a npm-ready project, or a Docker container. Then you could run it anywhere. The problem is that App Maker was built in GWT (basically what made sense in 2009), and because we didn't have a JS server runtime, ran JS script in Rhino on Java servers. Rhino was great at the time, but didn't evolve, and offered super-powers (like custom Java host objects that can observe mutations, even on arrays) that made JS written to our environment difficult to port. Also, all of the server and data interactions were via APIs that are strange by today's standards because of the layering on Java.