I've been excited about the progress that people are making with using Dojo server-side.

It feels like the Dojo is also serious about eventually working well on the server, perhaps moreso than most of the other client-side js libs.

To me, the real appeal of ssjs is not the much-touted "advantage" of having a GRAND UNIFIED CODEBASE ALL IN ONE LANGUAGE (though I was excited about Unified Codebases with Dojo, node, and RequireJS). Rather, the main advantage is simply being able to do DOM manipulations server-side with the same ease you'd do it client-side.

Server-side DOM manipulation is currently a pile of crap in every language other than js; but when you're using a js engine to render and serve your markup, this becomes much easier to do.

It also creates the possibility of doing server-side templating that also makes sense, rather than just implementing a shitty templating system for the sake of doing templated development (e.g., Django et al.).

Your templating engine sucks and everything you have ever written is spaghetti code (yes, you)