Since Swift 3 is boasting its new capabilities, it occurs to me that I don't actually know why Swift is server-side. I've been hunting "Full Stack" and the listings have MEAN, they have C#/ASP, some do MongoDB, Hadoop, Rest/SQL, but my main point is the interface language.
I was thinking, could it be network requests? All languages do Remote Procedure Calls. Then I was like "What about HTTP requests?", but they all do that also. I found a similar question on differences between, (posted in comments). But in nothing more than an epiphany, I realized all of them are interpreted on some level.
Are they server-side because they run "on the spot?", yet Swift is compiled and Java is a gray area (pardon my ignorance with bytecode if I'm wrong here).
Server-side javascript can take a POST request and process it now, but so can wordpress with an .htaccess modification (well, technically Apache's server, but still, the idea of a dynamic request stays the same).
So... why is Java with Grails a thing, but you never hear of C++ running a database request as "Full stack dev?"
Based on my level of ignorance, a simple "They are interpreted" if that is it, would be fine. Or "It can grab from a database" or "It processes queries fast enough to not hit the TCP/IP timeout limit of 60sec". I just, don't know why php is server-side and Objective C/C can't be.
I understand practicality on "shouldn't be, because too complex", but the solid, defining line on can/can't be server-side by taking requests and returning a database call, that is puzzling.
EDIT: Before writing this, I kept the idea that there's only one type of server. But Apache would "serve text" and while that text is processing it would "have data to process" while Swift/Express.js/Node would "be" the server and feed the data directly. I suppose my question pertained to html and "has script" vs the "is the server returning the text", but the answers are still the same. Apache I guess is more "boxed into a package" where I need to use a language that apache runs. But otherwise can make a daemon in any language to "serve" pages using 8080.
Thank you.