node.js is catching attention of many web developers. It seems that it will primetime sometime this summer when market demand for Web 3.0 apps will materialize. Key selling point of node.js is brutal efficency in terms of small bits of data, short requests.
Alot of people seem to have varying ways of defining Web 3.0, node.js I think will be the kind of backing technology for such a beast. Plurk sort of showed us how it will all be, even though its a bit quirky. 3.0 with be defined by javascript heavy client side apps (utilizing HTML5 when it comes) or using crutches like JQuery & MooTools to provide crossbrowser platform. node.js couples wonderfully to with Javascript on client side, and can provide realtime data, by the time WebSockets will come around.
Because node.js is javascript and much of active pseudo-application like content (AJAX & more) is backed by javascript, it will allow to reduce costs & complexities as Java promised and JavaScript (dare I say ECMA Script ? ) has delivered. JSON is already the most popular format for many people, as XML is highly complex. Most just hate it. JSON format is essentially Javascript.
Node.js follows a paradigm change in web request processing, initiated with nginx a project written to replace Apache. Node.js uses event driven processing and non-blocking IO/Database access to achieve efficency that we could only dream of. V8 JIT technology boosts performance quite a bit as well. And performance is improved by an order of magnitude. Yes, that it is around 10 times faster then comparable solutions with Ruby or Java.
Check out http://nodejs.org/
