The future is here! Two USians and a European working successfully on a 2-day hackathon using such technology that blurs the boundary between server and client ... what more could we ask for!
I haven't used or been excited by Node.js but after hearing about the dnode library they used I can see the attraction of having the same language on both the client and server:
Glad you like it! Doing node-chess has given me a ton of ideas for the dnode web framework I have planned too. The framework will provide a more structured and out-of-the-box way to organize code that spans the server and client, since it can be hard to remember which functions belong to which side of the connection. It will also have some routines to synchronize objects between the server and client since sometimes you want a low-latency mirror of an object on the browser side, as we found in node-chess.
Except robots