I'm reading a blog post about what Node.js is, and there's a glaring question "why in the world would anyone want to run JavaScript outside of a browser, let alone the server?" As the author of a
book about Node.js it's a question I've thought about quite a bit, especially coming as I do from the Java SE team at Sun where the work of that team was highly focused on server side software (hey, it's Java) to the detriment of the client side of Java. The question comes from a belief cemented into place by 15+ years of JavaScript in the browser that it's a browser only language. However, JavaScript has a long history on server-side and is a rather cool language, and Node.js is an excellent base for developing web applications.