Yes you can. There was no hype around asyn java libs (netty , grizzly, mina), however the chance of java folks having these problems is way higher than for javascript front end devs (the main audience of node).
Perhaps I did not clearly explain myself. It is no secret that you can write a async server in just about any language. Node's creator spent considerable time doing just that in C and Ruby before starting on Node, in fact.
However, creating a working solution does not free you of problems. Being bound to an obtuse language or API, for instance, is still a problem. One that will continue to haunt you for as long as the application lives.
Java Struts was, once upon a time, the framework of choice for web development. While it solved some problems, it created a whole new set of its own. A little known character, DHH, laughed at it and set out to build something better. While Java can produce a web application as well as any other, Rails became a big hype machine because it solved problems people had on the implementation side.
I recall EventMachine had a little bit of hype before Node came along, but it didn't solve the problem very well. Few supporting libraries supported asynchronous operation and the language just didn't feel right. I imagine your Java libraries suffer the same problem, and that is why they never saw much hype either.
Javascript, on the other hand, was designed to be asynchronous from the beginning. It had the perfect expressiveness for the job, and the libraries were all built to work in the environment. That is what made Node interesting, and why the hype followed. It solved peoples problems.
> Javascript, on the other hand, was designed to be asynchronous from the beginning. It had the perfect expressiveness for the job, and the libraries were all built to work in the environment. That is what made Node interesting, and why the hype followed. It solved peoples problems.
This is a bit of an overstatement, as we've seen since node became popular JS really doesn't have the appropriate amount of expressiveness. There are so many libraries that try to remove callback-hell from JS code (Step, node-fibers) but they all have their little issues and quirks because you just can't solve the problem well in JS. Now TameJS and IcedCoffeeScript are trying to attack the problem by implementing the solutions outside JS and compiling to it.
Yes you can. There was no hype around asyn java libs (netty , grizzly, mina), however the chance of java folks having these problems is way higher than for javascript front end devs (the main audience of node).