Once in a while, you realize you are reading more and more about new tools without understanding why they are becoming so popular.
I have been looking again at web technologies lately after several years of pure C#/desktop oriented development, and I found myself guilty of not quite getting the success behind node.js.
At first I was mislead by the “.js” name and thought it was yet another fancy jQuery like. But then I came to realize that it had really no connection, except the language.
Node.js is in fact a bundle of the V8 JavaScript engine and JavaScript libraries providing an environment to execute JavaScript on the server side.
Check these two links to understand how the full Node.js stack can be used, and in which cases:
v-frog 