Constraint programming is a declarative framework for modelling and solving combinatorial problems. In this talk I will give a short introduction to constraint programming with emphasis on global constraints and propagation. Global constraints are a fundamental component of a modern constraint solver that not only allow common combinatorial substructures to be modelled, but they also significantly prune the space. Further I will talk about some community wide efforts to standardise solver interfaces (MiniZinc), and some recent work done in Uppsala on constraint programming with bounded strings.