Recently years there are lots of praise to Nodes.js. I am not a developer that have much exposure on network application. From my bare understanding of Nodes.js, its strength is: We are having only on thread handling multiple connections, providing a event-based architecture.

However, for example in Java, what if I am having only one thread, using NIO/AIO (which is non-blocking APIs from my bare understanding), and handle multiple connections using that thread, and I provide an event-based architecture to implement the data handling logic (shouldn't be that difficult by providing some callback etc) ?

Given JVM being a even more mature VM than V8 (I expect it run faster too), and event-based handling architecture seems not something difficult to create. I am not sure why Nodes.js is attracting so much attention. Did I miss some important points?