One reason the language got named JavaScript is that when LiveScript (what it was first called) was first created, one of the first APIs written for it was LiveConnect, a bridge to Java. They thought this was such a big deal, they decided you could write entire apps by writing backend logic in Java Beans, then scripting them through LiveConnect. Thus the name change to reflect the new focus. I actually tried doing that, and like everyone else, failed miserably because LiveConnect was such a brittle piece of junk. The ironic thing is, the only stable browser scripting interface I could find at the time for Java was … Internet Explorer.
With Nashorn coming in JDK8, JS might become a useful target again for javax.script. Still, as the folks in ##java on IRC say, “Java is to Javascript as ham is to hamster.”