The trend continues where all things eventually get implemented in Javascript. Waiting for JS.js
What strikes me as odd is people wanting to write things that traditionally are written in C/C++ and more recently also in Go/Rust/Java/D in JS. The reason these arguably slower, in development speed, languages are used for things like DBs is that they are write once re-use thousands of times, and this use case warrants being slightly lower level and less rapid in development and gaining performance and I would argue maintainability.
[1] Note: In case you are wondering why I dislike JS: 1. JS's extensive use of spaghetti cough I mean callbacks 2. Higher effort needed to use compute resources for a single task in a parallel fashion compared to other langs 3. I dislike dynamically typed languages (I belive they are harder to maintain) 4. Performance: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...
I should note I know people who make this choice. They can write these things in C, and in the past, they have. But they are choosing Node.js. So it's not just a "what you know" affect.
While I understand that packaging motivation; it seems to me to be less relevant due to msi/rpm/deb packages. Those technologies make it pretty easy to package an application built with heterogeneous components.
It's true that it's easy to package such applications for unix systems, but it's much harder on Windows. What makes Node Webkit great is the fact that it's cross-platform with very little pain, and in that case having the DB in the JS code makes packaging a breeze.