Great explanation--the light bulb finally went on for me regarding node.js. Regarding the other framework event models (esp. EventMachine), is it beneficial or wise to use node for the I/O intensive stuff and another framework (e.g. rails) for the rest? Or does it make more sense to stay in the Ruby world? I'm sure there are lots of caveats to this question but it would be nice to see how node.js can integrate with existing web frameworks rather than trying to build everything with node.