[mvindahl]

Absolutely agree.

I've helped maintain REST APIs in both Java and NodeJS at different points in time.

Doing so in Java was always a painful iterative process; ask the ORM for data, painstakingly map the data to Java DTOs created mostly for defining JSON structure, pass it off to RESTEasy or some similar framework, see how the JSON turned out. Adjust and repeat until satisfied. Yuck.

In NodeJS, by contrast, fire off the SQL to get the data, map into the JS object that you need and return it.

Kind of funny how, years back, a selling point of GWT was that you could use the same language across the stack. It wasn't a bad idea, just a poor choice of language.