[barosl]

> A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server.

This is exactly what we do with server-side rendering today, huh. So the originally intended uses of JavaScript included servers too.

> Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects

This, not quite so.

[bazoom42]

Netscape had a line of web servers supporting server-side JavaScript. But who in their right mind would use JavaScript on the server side?

[ttepasse]

Back in 2000 there was a the Helma Object Publisher, a web application framework, written in Java, based on Netscape’s Rhino, afair, and enabling serverside Javascript including a form of ORM which mapped the db into JS objects. Antville, for a time the biggest austro-german blogging community, was and I think still is written in it.

https://github.com/antville/helma

[fuzztester]

Yes, it was called Netscape Application Server. They changed the product line name later, to IPlanet Application Server, IIRC.

Modules written in JavaScript and run on the server were called AppLogics (bad name, IMO).

[peteri]

As did Microsoft with ASP (your choice was VBScript or JScript for a scripting language)

[pmontra]

They were very slow even compared to the Java of that age.

[severino]

>> Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects

> This, not quite so.

Well, technically, one can (and often does) use Javascript to send an asynchronous request to a server that -when programmed using a Java based framework- will probably modify the properties of one or more Java objects, i.e., some entity, etc.

[gleenn]

Java Applets were a thing for a long time though. Interesting but very dead tech.

[cabalamat]

They were essentially the same idea as WASM -- a portable machine code that runs on web browsers -- but a quarter of a century earlier.

I suspect Java applets fell out of fashion because they could only manipulate a rectangular area of the screen and not the DOM. Did the DOM even exist in 1995?

[afandian]

The book "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" had a server-side component since I think the first edition in 1996.

[distcs]

I never understood these books. Who reads a 1000 page book to learn a programming language? I bought this particular book some 10 years ago hoping to "master" javascript. The book was so dull that I could not even get to the 3rd chapter. There are books about much more complex subjects that wrap up in < 400 pages. What's really the market of these doorstop books?

[oaiey]

Following that time frameworks like ASP or Coldfusion (?) had server side JavaScript for code snippets similar to what the browsers were doing on the client. So I think, the JavaScript on the server note here is more addressing the ASP use case then the nodejs one.