BANGALORE, INDIA: Erlang, a programming language originally created in 1987 by Ericsson in its Computer Science Laboratory isn't exactly what anyone would call 'new', let alone the next big thing.

In fact, it's so old that many of you may have never heard of it till now either. So then, just why and how can a 20-year-old language suddenly become the next big thing?

The answer, lies in the many features of Erlang, with one in particular ? concurrency, or the built-in ability to run a program over a cluster of machines, even those of different platforms, which makes it easy to scale your applications to support any number of users or transactions almost instantly.

Now, combine that with the support for fault-tolerance, non-stop applications and hot code replacement and you might get an idea why Erlang could be very attractive for web and software applications in use today.

In fact, Erlang is already demonstrating that power, moving from powering a real-time telecom application for an ATM switch like AXD301 from Ericsson, to a real-time chat application for Facebook.com, which supports over 70 million users.

Another real example is Yaws, short for Yet Another Web Server, a web server coded in Erlang. This server, in a benchmark test, held on even with 80,000 parallel requests, when Apache died at just over 4,000 parallel sessions.

All that power comes from the features of Erlang, like these:

Open Source & Availability in a variety of platforms
Erlang is a freely available, open source language, which makes it easier to change and adapt. It's also available on a variety of hardware platforms; like Linux and Windows as pre-compiled binaries and for others like Mac OS X, compliable from source.