Shifting from Lua to JS is not trivial! What JS engine did you use?
And can you tell us a bit more about the choice of Java to create apps? Wasn't it frustrating for all the C++ coders in your team to use such a "slow" language for apps?
At the time (very very early) there was only a small amount of code and small amount of native bindings, so it only took a couple days to rebuild the lower layers and I recall Chris got the "framework" running again in js pretty quickly after that was done. I think maybe we used spidermonkey? It's been 15+ years... somebody at Google with access to the fadden demo should be able to figure it out quickly enough.
As for Java, it worked well enough for Hiptop at Danger on a 24MHz ARM7TDMI platform. We felt we could use a similar approach (use Java more for "business logic" and do the heavy lifting in native libraries and services) to get sufficient performance on the 200MHz+ ARM9 platforms we were looking at, and take advantage of having a real MMU for process protection and eventually supporting native code (the latter, more contentious).
And can you tell us a bit more about the choice of Java to create apps? Wasn't it frustrating for all the C++ coders in your team to use such a "slow" language for apps?