This book provides the conceptual foundation required for the design and development of complex distributed and real-time applications. It summarizes a large spectrum of concepts; by concentrating on Java and presenting mainly the programmatic aspects and basic functioning of the concepts, the readability and ease of comprehension are greatly improved. Thus the idea behind the book is not to overwhelm the reader, but rather to provide sufficient information for the creation of prototypes, covering most aspects of an application. The reader will be guided to determine himself which is the best global architecture for the application: thin or thick client; direct database access or EJBs; listeners or multi-threading; etc. The book also presents a number of architectures, namely sets of components, threads and links, around which the functionalities of the application may be built and checked incrementally. One of the strengths of this book is the availability of simple examples, which have all been carefully checked and are available at the book’s website.

Basic Java features - Security and authentication - XML and Compilation - MySQL - Web applications - Enterprise Java beans - Multithreading and active objects - Process development.

The book first elaborates on the current ecology of the World Wide Web, where autonomous information sources come and go in dynamic and unpredictable ways.

With a novel, less classical approach to the subject, the authors have written a book with the conviction that signal processing should be taught to be fun.

With the rapid growth of the language and speech industry, there is an increasing need for specialists able to work in multi-disciplinary projects combining elements of speech processing, natural language processing, and computer science.