Sam Newman, ThoughtWorks’ Global Innovation Lead wrote that JavaScript has been seen as a serious language for the last two or three years and it is being used as a serious platform. ThoughtWorks’ Technology Advisory Board moved Node.js from ‘trial’ to ‘adopt’ on the radar. Node.js' success has been that the number of people that traditionally saw themselves as client-side developers and found the world of server-side computing available to them Newman wrote.
“The other part of that is obviously that Node.js’ server technology has some interesting capabilities available to it; it can support large numbers of connections, it can spin up in a very, very short space of time unlike say Java,” he said.
The primary driver for Node.js’ success has been the fact that it is JavaScript — [offering] the ability to have the same language on the front-end and the backend systems, he added. JavaScript has emerged both as a platform for server-side code “but also a platform to host other languages.
There are still some challenges facing JavaScript. The sheer size of the install base means that it’s going to be a while before we have new language features available.
