Just curious, what other server side languages do you feel have a better library ecosystem than Node/JS?
* Pre-confugured prod/dev/test environments
* Preconfigured webpack for the environments above
* DB migrations
* telemetry/metrics with live dashboard
etc
P.S. encrypted signed cookies, changesets (validations for db models or arbitrary forms), clustering, websocket stuff, "liveview" serverside rendering ...
That said, I've seen that "liveview" thing demoed and that is definitely pretty slick. Off topic but it's very similar to a package I implemented in Django like 6 years ago or so (and happened to name it the exact same thing, too) --- sadly was for work in a proprietary setting, although I'm off-and-on working on remaking it now for a different project where I can open source it.
I haven't tried Spring Boot, so I can't speak to that, but gather that a lot of people like it. Otherwise, though, it's kind of a mess of too @#$% many options and no clear winner aside from the legacy stuff that nobody actually enjoys working with on the flagship language, an alternative language that was initially promising for web development but ultimately collapsed under the weight of its own creeping featuritis, an alternative language that collapsed under the weight of efforts to turn it into Jonathan Livingston Programming Language, an alternative language that collapsed under the weight of a cult of personality, and an alternative language that looks poised to collapse under the weight of Oracle v. Google.
I too find it annoying that everything feels like early 00s as it prevents uptake; I think most can be fixed by creating a new, modern website for the project, adding examples how to interact with the system with modern tools and a 'try it out in your browser'. Many Apache projects, for instance, are great and very robust in the current time, however, when you go there to do research on what to use for a new project, the examples start with XML files and then Java classes. No matter what I think of node, examples these days must include a little few-liner with node, python, go, curl, java, clojure, ... . Most people like the idea of java -jar somethinggreat.jar, but opening IntelliJ, adding all kinds of arcane (when you are used to Go, Node, etc) artifacts and then writing actual Java code which you did not want to do in the first place, really hurts adoption imho. And made many projects not even appear on anyone's radar.
Like (anecdotally) picking mongo for a (trading) case geode was basically made for, but mongo was hip, not 'old apache' and not 'old java'.
The declining interest in Java is offset by Kotlin, Scala, and Clojure.
Did the Dart guys somehow gain massive momentum? Or is Electron or React eating this up?
I dismissed everything else pretty quickly for being too limited in what platforms I could target. Kotlin's out for being a poor choice for iOS. Dart/Flutter is out for not yet having fully baked desktop support.
The performance lacks somewhat and the debugging tools are not as mature as JVM's. But the libraries, frameworks, and overall development productivity are great.
Not only better library ecosystem, more performance and tooling.
To say nothing of trying to get patches into the core. Be prepared to wait months for any response at all, every time getting the feedback that there is some new minor problem (or even worse, a "this needs to be talked about" without any followup).
It's not a healthy ecosystem. For that you require high-quality core libs, a strong developer ecosystem (that doesn't mean a lot of devs, it means good ones) and a culture of third-party libraries being few but high-quality. Anything else is going to end up pissing you off, guaranteed.
The original project I was discussing ended up going with Kotlin on the server, and everyone (including devs) are super happy with it.
I program in Node/JS currently and programmed in Java about 10 years ago. But my preferred language will always be Ruby. I will never understand why "the community" (ML, scripting etc) preferred Python to Ruby.