We're aiming for the Rails (and PHP!) crowd you mention with Akshell (http://www.akshell.com). Our custom made server uses an Apache MPM like setup with synchronous I/O. Synchronous code is much easier to write and maintain and most real world webapps should be optimized for developer efficiency and ease of maintenance, rather than raw performance.
That being said, we are using V8 just as Node and do support JS only NodeJS (and other CommonJS) packages. We are also looking to integrate Node into the platform for doing real time web socket type of operations.
That being said, we are using V8 just as Node and do support JS only NodeJS (and other CommonJS) packages. We are also looking to integrate Node into the platform for doing real time web socket type of operations.