JavaScript Servers Compared
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner test-drives five leading JavaScript servers and finds the results compelling though still a work-in-progress. 'I enjoyed the challenge and stimulation of rethinking everything I know about the server, but I still found myself hesitant to push these new ideas too far or too fast. The speed of experimentation and development is heady and exciting to the open source crowd, but it will probably seem scary to corporate developers who like the long, stable lives of tools from Microsoft or Oracle. Some of these platforms will probably morph three or four times over the next few years, something that won't happen to the good, old JSP standard in the Java world,' Wayner writes in review of Node.js, Jaxer, EJScript, RingoJS, and AppengineJS."
Burn the bible
Hi. We (I'm a google employee) have GWT, which compiles java to javascript, but we don't actually use it much. Most projects I'm aware use Javascript written as javascript. We do use build scripts to pre-process, include dependencies, and minimize/obfuscate, though.
In terms of numerical computation? Probably. In terms of actual useful web applications, Node.js meets or beats compiled Java in the benchmarks that I've seen, even with the Java Code using esoteric and not commonly used behaviours like Non-Blocking IO: http://www.subbu.org/blog/2011/03/nodejs-vs-play-for-front-end-apps
V8 is actually really damn fast.