So I've been hearing a LOT about node.js lately. The proponents seem to tout it as second coming of Christ. This piqued my interest and I decided to read up on it.
I came across multiple sources with benchmark numbers, and it clearly does an excellent job for handling large number of concurrent requests. But the 'callback' way of writing code just feels very 'unnatural' to me. A little bit of research led me to Eventlet, which lets me do asynchronous operations while writing code that looks very much like synchronous (hence making me more productive).
But Node.js seems to be much more powerful than Eventlet (http://codescience.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/non-blocking-io-node-js-and-pythons-eventlet). I'm assuming it's because of the V8 JS engine. Is there a Java/Javascript offering that allows me to perform asynchronous operations while writing synchronous code, thus giving me the best of both worlds - developer productivity along with the performance of JVM/V8?
Node.js supports can support async - await syntax allowing you to run asynchronous operations with synchronous looking code
Check this out:
https://github.com/koush/node/wiki/%22async%22-support-in-node.js