In spite of the omnipresence of parallel (multi-core) systems, the predominant strategy to evaluate window-based stream joins is still strictly sequential, mostly just straightforward along the definition of the operation semantics. In this paper, the author’s present handshake join, a way of describing and executing window-based stream joins that is highly amenable to parallelized execution. Handshake join naturally leverages available hardware parallelism, which they demonstrate with an implementation on a modern multi-core system and on top of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), an emerging technology that has shown distinctive advantages for high-throughput data processing.