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Asynchronous, and Node being so HTTP-friendly - I cannot begin to explain the sheer number of regurgitated "build a webserver in Node" tutorials that got writte

Asynchronous, and Node being so HTTP-friendly - I cannot begin to explain the sheer number of regurgitated "build a webserver in Node" tutorials that got written up back in the day. For whatever reason, you could have done this stuff in Rhino - for better or for worse - it's just that nobody ever took it as seriously.

saurik 5y ago
Not only could you, but some of us even did (though it definitely was never, as you say, "taken seriously"). What made it super powerful (and very node.js-like) was combining it with Jetty, which was a servlet engine that could be used as a library. My (trivial, personal blog) website is still running with this stack (though I finally put it behind an nginx SSL terminator as I have been putting off upgrading Java and Bouncy Castle just couldn't keep up), and it gives me more warm fuzzies than v8 alternatives. A "people actually used this" framework that had Rhino at its core (well, in one of many ways of using it) was Apache Cocoon (which was maybe more by-default based in XSL/T), only they did something almost ridiculously clever: as Rhino had full support for continuations, they didn't need "callback hell" (or async/await) and could even support pseudo-synchronous code that could block on the user (such as a function which sent the user a form and returned the user's selection, possibly hours later) by storing the continuation state in the user's session.
- Klonoar 5y ago
  >A "people actually used this" framework that had Rhino at its core (well, in one of many ways of using it) was Apache Cocoon (which was maybe more by-default based in XSL/T), only they did something almost ridiculously clever: as Rhino had full support for continuations, they didn't need "callback hell" (or async/await) and could even support pseudo-synchronous code that could block on the user (such as a function which sent the user a form and returned the user's selection, possibly hours later) by storing the continuation state in the user's session. Wow! I'd only dabbled in Rhino back in the day so this is a neat little bit of history. Teleports me back to when this stuff felt fun...
neurostimulant 5y ago
I think it's due to the huge hype around chrome among developers back then. Each tab as separate process was huge. It also has built-in dev tool, and v8 being actually fast excites a lot of devs and drove them away from firefox. So when nodejs was released, a lot of people already know what v8 is and have positive impression of it, probably enough to nudge them to try nodejs. On the other hand, I never heard of Rhino until now.

saurik 5y ago

Not only could you, but some of us even did (though it definitely was never, as you say, "taken seriously"). What made it super powerful (and very node.js-like) was combining it with Jetty, which was a servlet engine that could be used as a library. My (trivial, personal blog) website is still running with this stack (though I finally put it behind an nginx SSL terminator as I have been putting off upgrading Java and Bouncy Castle just couldn't keep up), and it gives me more warm fuzzies than v8 alternatives. A "people actually used this" framework that had Rhino at its core (well, in one of many ways of using it) was Apache Cocoon (which was maybe more by-default based in XSL/T), only they did something almost ridiculously clever: as Rhino had full support for continuations, they didn't need "callback hell" (or async/await) and could even support pseudo-synchronous code that could block on the user (such as a function which sent the user a form and returned the user's selection, possibly hours later) by storing the continuation state in the user's session.

Klonoar 5y ago
>A "people actually used this" framework that had Rhino at its core (well, in one of many ways of using it) was Apache Cocoon (which was maybe more by-default based in XSL/T), only they did something almost ridiculously clever: as Rhino had full support for continuations, they didn't need "callback hell" (or async/await) and could even support pseudo-synchronous code that could block on the user (such as a function which sent the user a form and returned the user's selection, possibly hours later) by storing the continuation state in the user's session. Wow! I'd only dabbled in Rhino back in the day so this is a neat little bit of history. Teleports me back to when this stuff felt fun...

neurostimulant 5y ago

I think it's due to the huge hype around chrome among developers back then. Each tab as separate process was huge. It also has built-in dev tool, and v8 being actually fast excites a lot of devs and drove them away from firefox. So when nodejs was released, a lot of people already know what v8 is and have positive impression of it, probably enough to nudge them to try nodejs. On the other hand, I never heard of Rhino until now.