Well this is not an answer any single person can or should want to give you, but I'll try to summarize the big picture anyway: 1. Nodejs is really well documen

Well this is not an answer any single person can or should want to give you, but I'll try to summarize the big picture anyway: 1. Nodejs is really well documented code. This is very rare, and much more so in the Javascript world. 2. It has a nice, easy to use package manager. In comparison, I have a hard time containing my boiling rage over Maven... 3. Nodejs was marketed as very fast. Although async+fast solutions exist with other languages and frameworks too, they require you to be very knowledgable in those areas. Nodejs is a no-brainer. They practically guaranteed you that you are not going to get bad performance, because in Javascript you can't use blocking calls. Nodejs users care about performance. Java programmers tell you to not worry about it. (attention: gross generalization) 4. Javascript programmers don't know about better solutions. In fact, I'd say that most of the PHP crowd doesn't know better solutions either. There's your huge market. 5. Javascript is easy to program in. You can have your production server up and running with a few lines of code. I believe an experienced Java programmer when he says that the LOC (lines of code) are not much more with Java. But you do need to learn a lot more to get to that point. Nodejs is self-contained. Personally, I do not want to program large projects in a dynamic language. I still made a small prototype in Nodejs before moving on though. It's too messy for me :)