Right, I just don't see the point, are people so adverse to learning a new language that they need this. I mean it is logical that higher form languages are built on top of lower level ones. But this to me seems parallel. It is not like JavaScript is a low level run-time and in fact in some ways it is easier to pick up than Java for the uninitiated.

I assume that Oracle is doing this so that people can write Java in a browser. But I don't get it, Java's efforts at being a UI language have been disastrous, both web UI and desktop.

For the same reason it make a fairly decent middleware language is the same reason that it is a poor selection for the UI. It is ridged, it trades off flexibility for safety. Which is a good thing in the middleware layer, but when it comes to writing a UI, it seems that it always has it's feet in the wrong place.

Javascript despite it's warts is a very good UI development language. I was just thinking about this the other day, when I was working on a project, I use two toolkits in my day to day work Dojo and jQuery and I was just thinking about how totally different they are and how they deal with their problem sets very well.

Dojo allows me to build up reusable widgets that are self encapsulated that can just be dropped on a page and jQuery allows me to treat the DOM almost like SQL. They are very different in their approach but yet both are built from the same building block. You just don't see that kind of diversity in Java.

Again it is for a reason, and those reasons are good in the middleware and systems integration layer, but they are cumbersome in the UI. So it makes me wonder, why people are so adverse to learning a new language that is designed for it's problem domain.