About This Issue . . . This issue includes articles on software engineering frameworks, business computing algorithms, and concurrency control performance. Scott Lewandowski ™s article œFrameworks for ComponentBased Client/Server Computing  is the first winner of the Computing Surveys student paper award. It presents an indepth review of frameworks for clientserver computing and of principles that underlie CORBA, DCOM, COM, and Java-based client-server technologies. It explores frameworks for distributed objects, business objects, and compound documents. The high standards of this paper provide a baseline for future submissions to the Surveys ™ student paper competition. Ran El-Yaniv ™s article œCompetitive Solutions for Online Financial Problems  examines tasks that can be modeled by monetary cost or profit from a game-theoretic rather than a probabilistic (Bayesian)-perspective. It models search problems, replacement problems, portfolio selection, and leasing problems using competitive ratio techniques in the context of two-person games, where the opponent aims to minimize the advantage of the player for a known (public) algorithm. It is gratifying to include a paper on this emerging and increasingly important area as a part of our overall strategy of keeping up with the times and surveying new applicationoriented topics in computer science. Alexander Thomasian ™s œConcurrency Control: Methods, Performance, and Analysis  a traditional area of computer science from a new perspective. It provides a performance analysis of both standard and nonstandard locking techniques, exploring methods of improving locking performance. The techniques examined include restart-oriented locking methods, the running priority method, and optimistic concurrency control techniques. The conclusions neatly summarize insights concerning tradeoffs among alternative locking methods and reviews locking literature for active and distributed databases as well as multidatabases. The editors wish to thank the student committee headed by John Cavazos of the University of Massachusetts for judging the Computing Surveys ™ student paper competition. He has agreed to head the student committee for a second year and looks forward to contributions for the second student paper competition which are due by June 30th. Inquiries about the competition should be addressed to him at cavazos@cs. umass.edu. Permission to make digital / hard copy of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and / or a fee. © 1998 ACM 0360-0300/98/0300 “0001 $5.00 ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 30, No. 1, March 1998

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