I read another blog post by an author who interviewed Ryan Dahl. Ryan is the creator of "node.js". This is a program that is good for easily creating a network based program. The program is only available in source code format. You need to compile it yourself on your machine. The only thing it requires is that Python be on your box.The node.js set of APIs are similar to those for browsers. The main object in node is a process. A key tenet of the system is that your calls should never have to wait on anything such as file I/O.
Dahl is proud that node supports HTTP. He says that although the protocol may seem trivial, it is actually quite complicated under the covers. Node gives you the ability to code in JavaScript even though your programs don't run in the web browser.
Node is built on the V8 JavaScript engine. A main goal of node is to be super fast. Dahl boasts that it can handle 822 requests per second. That performs favorably to the ultra fast Nginx server. Dahl did concede that node is probably not the best solution for really large web sites.
