Apache or PHP certainly can't last forever. While I don't know what will take their place, or when, or who will benefit, I do think we will see some trends goin

Apache or PHP certainly can't last forever. While I don't know what will take their place, or when, or who will benefit, I do think we will see some trends going forward: More and more server code for web applications will be written in Javascript, as WebGL enables web-based gaming platforms, as offline applications share code between client and server, as Javascript becomes more popular as a language, and developers realize the benefits of concentrating language knowledge, and the performance gains made by Javascript engines. More and more server code will be evented, in order to use WebSockets and maintain connections. Programmers will come to terms with the fact that the theoretical efficiencies of threads over events are not likely to be realized anytime soon, non-blocking IO will eventually be accepted on pragmatic terms. Programmers will learn to see problems as streams, and as streaming interfaces converge, it will become easier to pump streams from one place to another. As it becomes easier to write efficient networked applications using programming interfaces which mirror the underlying activity, the duo of nginx/application server on the same machine will converge towards just application server. As systems become more distributed, as the efficiencies of disk storage change, and as memory becomes cheaper, programmers will move from thinking about disk storage, to thinking about global state storage. In-memory caching, disk persistence, and sharding will be managed by the same service. Programmers will move from thinking in terms of SQL, or noSQL, to thinking in terms of data structures: strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, trees, and so the database will become a persisted data structure service. While I think that Node, and Redis have head starts in these departments, the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to them all.