In the ideal world, your application should “just work” on IPv6, just as it does on IPv4. However, in the real world, application issues crop up. These could be...

One of the most debated consequences regarding the increased availability and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially since the early 1990s, have been their impact on economic growth. Generally speaking, ICT can serve to reduce transaction costs at all levels of a commercial transaction. With the emergence...

In 1983 I left the International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences (ITC) and went to Wageningen Agricultural University, where I took the chair of “Land Surveying and Teledetection”. Up to that time I had been active mainly in geodesy and photogrammetry, but at Wageningen it soon became...

There is probably no invention in the history of mankind that had such a profound impact on our lives in such a short time as the World Wide Web. Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee has developed the first versions of HTML which allowed to weave documents into the large hypertext document that we know today. It was soon realized that...

Recently, the rapid and fundamental advances in computing technologies have been driving the role and scope of software systems to a new level. A number of new types of software systems are emerging, among which service based systems, cloud computing, pervasive computing, and Internet of Things are eminent examples. For these systems,...

The IBM Vienna Laboratory has made a significant contribution to the work on the semantic description of computer systems. Both the operational semantics descriptions ("VDL") and the later work on denotational semantics ("Meta-IV", "VEM") contain interesting scientific ideas. Partly because of the large...

Multimedia is now a broad “umbrella” that innovatively combines different fields of research and industry to produce practical solutions that are used on a wide scale today. Some of these fields are signal processing, imaging and color science, video and audio analysis, 2D/3D graphics, information theory, compression,...

What is security? Is it a mindset? Is it a measurable and actionable posture or position? Or is it a bit of both? People, as a race, learn from doing; they learn by example. Ingrained into our psyche is a process that builds new information upon previous knowledge as we learn. As Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further than...

Since its release, Spring Framework has transformed virtually every aspect of Java development including web applications, security, aspect-oriented programming, persistence, and messaging. Spring Batch, one of its newer additions, now brings the same familiar Spring idioms to batch processing. Spring Batch addresses the needs of any batch...

Microsoft Access is a unique platform that enables rapid development of database applications. It has been a long-time favorite of both developers and end users for creating single-user and small-scale office automation solutions. Recent improvements have made it a viable choice for enterprise-class applications as well. In this book,...

The book addresses the problem known in the literature as Open and Distance Learning (ODL). ODL describes new concepts of the process of learning-teaching organization. ODL is becoming very popular at universities that offer education via online and/or distance learning, both in synchronous or asynchronous modes. More precisely, the...

You have to give Adobe credit. There aren’t many companies that have managed to change the world once, let alone twice. In 1985, Adobe introduced PostScript, which became the rock on which the entire electronic publishing industry was built; they forever changed the world of professional printing. In 1994, Adobe launched...