This may be just my impression, but if someone really had a need for an async server, they wrote it in something else before. I'm not saying node.js is bad in any way, but there are more established alternatives in languages people already use. They were used before and they did the job. Is node.js going to be a temporary thing?... we'll see. Is it that different from what we already had? (compare http://github.com/jamwt/diesel/blob/master/examples/http.py and http://nodejs.org/api.html#synopsis-0 ) not really.