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When Suneido was first conceived, almost all software was being written to run on a Windows desktop or laptop, with perhaps a server on the local network (i.e. in the same building) to hold the shared data. Building and deploying applications was difficult and error-prone.

One of Suneido's main goals was to be an effective all-in-one development environment, that hid most of the pain of building and deploying applications. The other was stability of the language and applications written in the language. As apmckinlay says,

There are two related ideas to "the Suneido way". One is the all-in-one, integrated idea. The other is the resulting stability. We've used the same language and UI code for 15 years. We're like Cobol :-) The flavor of the month approach of web development is all very well, but it doesn't really fit with writing a "legacy" system. What I'm getting at is that we might have to use the flavor of the month under the covers, but it shouldn't be exposed at the application level. Just like jSuneido is a completely different technology from cSuneido, but the application level stays the same.

The state of web application development in 2015 has some analogies to client-server application development in the 1990s. It's the standard joke that one's favourite JavaScript framework depends on which week you ask. There are a multitude of database back ends. There are multiple back-end frameworks (e.g. Ruby on Rails). Deploying the back end of a web app can be difficult, and again there are a variety of tools you can use to solve that problem.

In addition, you pretty much need to know three languages to do development: CSS and HTML, JavaScript, and your back end language. Plus you have a tonne of enhanced versions of CSS and JavaScript that you might work with.

The goal of suneido.js is to provide a language and development environment that an application developer can use to write code that will continue to work for 20 years, while providing a modern web-based experience for the user.