V8 has little to do with Oracle, fundamentally. V8 came about because they wanted a higher performance JS VM for their browser; the JVM was never in contention there.
V8 didn't come about because of the JVM, but it was done by the same guy who wrote the JVM.
A high performance JS VM means we don't need to use applets anymore.
https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076251/core-java/applets-...
(Note that the article is from 2000.)
Remember that Google was already doing AJAX in Gmail in 2004, years before V8.
I find this amusing. No one ever built anything meaningful client-side with Java. There's a reason Microsoft laughed off Java as "write once, debug many".
Your statement would be true if you have said "anything meaningful client-side on the web with Java". On the web Java was restricted to Java applets and was never really in competition with JavaScript.
Desktop is quite another story.
I do think Sun entertained Java superseding Javascript in the browser - it just didn't work out that way.
Both Microsoft and Apple made it difficult in different ways, and the "year of linux on the desktop" has yet to really come (no ChromeOS don't count)
Not a problem when everyone is using Windows and Netscape. It's as horrible as you'd think.
Java applets were already considered a dying tech when Google made their push to heavily-Javascript-dependent apps, and the performance requirements that led to.
Note also that despite the similar name, Javascript and Java have technically nothing to do with each other. It is a quirk of business history [1] that Netscape and Sun partnered to name Javascript as it is when Sun was first pushing Java as a web technology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Beginnings_at_Netsc...
Netscape was still trying to sell a browser, and they wanted a common language on the frontend and backend, so Javascript was also on Netscape Server.
It was possible to call JavaScript from a Java applet and method in a Java applet from JavaScript (on a web page).
This functionality can be seen in Java 2 (now known as Java 1.2) - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/basics-137133.html .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)#Release... has JavaScript and Java as part of the same release for Netscape. The next release of Netscape Navigator (3.0) had LiveConnect version 1 ( http://web.mit.edu/javascript/src/mozilla/js/src/liveconnect... ) which was that cross language communication.
I would be willing to contend that in the view of "Java applets are where the web is going" back then, the difficulty of communication between the applet and the enclosing page was something that needed some scripting glue and that JavaScript, from its inception, was to be that glue. It took about a year to get it working, but this was the initial goal of JavaScript.
Actually, Java was already mostly dead for the public web when Chrome and V8 were being developed, it was more Flash that was the competition.
All of these JavaScript implementations use the V8 JVM and can make desktop and command line application. Depending on security settings they can give partial to full system access to the underlying OS just like Java. If this ruling is upheld I would look for Oracle to float a trial balloon on newer JavaScript implementations and for stealing their Java's API's.
V8 is not a JVM (Java Virtual Machine), but a virtual machine for Javascript.