The document discusses asynchronous and non-blocking I/O with JRuby. It explains that asynchronous operations are better than synchronous operations because they use fewer resources and allow for parallelism. It provides an example of building a JRuby application with the Ratpack framework that makes asynchronous HTTP requests to eBay's API in a non-blocking way using promises. It also discusses using RxJava and Hystrix with Ratpack to build a book management application that handles data and API requests asynchronously.