Can you give some reasons you think Javascript isn't good enough for server side programming?
Certainly the language is pretty powerful, and with Rhino it's fairly easy to integrate with existing libraries.
Certainly the language is pretty powerful, and with Rhino it's fairly easy to integrate with existing libraries.
Until Rails ruby wasn't a particularly nice language for coding server-side web applications. In 2002-2003 I worked for a company developing one, and had it taken off we would have had to rework it in another language very quickly.
Sure it was. You just had to know where to look for frameworks and libs and how to code in Ruby.
Until Rails, people mostly wrote CGI-style applications.
(Yes, there was mod_perl, which people mostly used to make their framework-less web apps run a little faster; and there were Java MVC frameworks. Those were the exception, though, not the rule. Most people just wrote CGI scripts.)
Rolling your own request-handler+template thing is not hard. Nor is using DBI. Having stuff all bundled up is a big win, but it's not something essential. Ruby's a clean, fun language.
"Until Rails, people mostly wrote CGI-style applications."
Well, maybe that was prevalent with Ruby (whose mod_ruby is/was iffy), but mod_php was damn near everywhere before Rails.