When Node first came out, all of the hype around it was using the same language on the client and the server OR at least managing all of your frontend bits in a

When Node first came out, all of the hype around it was using the same language on the client and the server OR at least managing all of your frontend bits in a language independent of your server side language. At the time, there were JS/CSS/image minifiers in just about every language IIRC. Doing it with Node was a stronger argument to at least save the frontend side of the house from having to find a way to do them with Java or ASP. During that time period, Java compile times were so slow that using PHP as a frontend that spoke to Java backends with SOAP services was really, really common just to avoid slowing everything on the frontend down with Java.