It’s happening Ever since Swift was open sourced by Apple including a release for Linux, people speculated about why Apple would do this. The most popular theory was that Apple itself wanted to use Swift on the server. And these days, even for Apple — server equals Linux — hence the Linux release. As far as we know, much of Apple’s server infrastructure (at least the stores) is build on WebObjects — a technology that is showing its age (to put it mildly).

I think that it’s well-established by now that the majority of desktop software will move to the browser at some point. It happened to e-mail, calendar, word processing and many more applications already. But here’s a crazy idea: what if we move the server to the browser as well? The past week I’ve been playing with socket.io in mobl, my language for developing mobile web apps. Socket.io is a library that greatly simplifies building real-time web applications — applications that keep a connection (a socket) open to the server, allowing the server to push content to the client and vice versa.