Server-side development is changing too, but differently and more slowly than on the client. Some forces I see changing server-side development are:

Multi-core is here.

8-way servers are common these days. 4-way cell phones are here. The laptop on which I'm writing this blog has 4 cores; so does my tablet.

But software development still mostly is written to utilize a single thread of execution.

The more cores we have in our hardware, the more pronounced this mismatch will become, which will pressure the industry into changing software-development practices to take advantage of the new power.

Functional programming (FP) is one promising means of taking advantage of multi-core processors. When done in a pure manner, often the compiler can parallelize certain tasks automatically. Other operations–such as applying a single function over a large collection of data–can also be parallelized automatically if coded in a functional style.

Please see Functional Programming Home for an index of my articles on FP.

Javascript can be used as a functional language, and using Node.js can run on the server side. I have little contact with it and currently work in a large Java shop. But to the extent that it crosses my radar, I'll make notes about that here.

Here are some general notes about Java that are applicable to server-side developers.

• In Java 5, 0 is not always equal to 0
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