Node.js employs an event-driven architecture and a non-blocking I/O model, and it provides some blindingly fast performance to some types of data-intensive Web apps. It is about JavaScript on the server side. LinkedIn, Yahoo and eBay are among ardent Node.js users, and none other than Microsoft has discussed end-to-end JavaScript coverage on its Azure cloud. The objective is absolutely fast I/O.

This article features Joyent CTO and co-founder Jason Hoffman, who discusses the roots and reason of node.js. He said:

“Why we did it is, at Joyent we have a lot of servers, more than most companies in the Fortune500 and we write in C, in a compiled language. We needed to write servers in a dynamic language for talking to certain protocols. Basically, we had to write service endpoints. The Node part of Node.js is separate. It is designed so that it can handle a lot endpoints – on the order of a million. Most things written for the [Java Virtual Machine] can only handle 20,000 [endpoints]. Node is meant to handle a lot of I/O. So we took the node part and married that with V8 [the JavaScript virtual machine from Google].”

Source: Ajaxian