As someone who did Java WebApps for 10 years - they sucked if you cared about making a good user interface. I thought JS was bad at the time, but node.js was a

As someone who did Java WebApps for 10 years - they sucked if you cared about making a good user interface. I thought JS was bad at the time, but node.js was a breath of fresh air for API development, and client side JS has been fine for like 10 years (assuming you care about UI development). I'd never go back to Java except for maybe some backend service away from the UI.