Dear Readers:

This issue contains two papers from very different areas, typical for the flavour of J.UCS: The first one is on "Performance of RDBMS-WWW Interfaces under Heavy Workload" by S. Hadjiefthymiades, I. Varouxis, and D. Martakos. It presents a client/server architecture aiming at diminishing overheads encountered in conventional WWW-database gateways, particularly the often encountered relational databases. The second one, "Invariant Patterns in Crystal Lattices: Implications for Protein Folding Algorithms" by W. E. Hart and Sorin Istrail, is part of the January special issue of JUCS dedicated to Professor S. Rudeanu. Because of a late submission the paper is published in the current issue. Enjoy the reading, in a pause on a nice summer or winter day, whatever the case may be!

Cheers,