I downloaded and played with Sun’s Phobos after reading about it at Ongoing. It’s a script host, written in Java, that’ll run applications written in JavaScript and Ruby.
I’d skip the example application, and download and run the JavaOne demo. That’ll give you an idea of what they’re trying to do. It didn’t work for me in Safari, so try it with Firefox.
A Phobos application is a bundle/folder of scripts, templates, and some configuration. You write a controller that maps URLs to views. The templates look like JSP. Phobos introduces some objects for getting information from the request, as well as writing responses: a Rails/MVC approach.
Funny thing is that ten years ago, Netscape had server side JavaScript. It was called LiveWire back then. Now there’s at least ten Server Side JavaScript projects.
