  The soft-wall AdS/QCD model, modified by a positive-sign dilaton metric,
leads to a remarkable one-parameter description of nonperturbative hadron
dynamics. The model predicts a zero-mass pion for zero-mass quarks and a Regge
spectrum of linear trajectories with the same slope in the leading orbital
angular momentum $L$ of hadrons and the radial quantum number $N$. Light-Front
Holography maps the amplitudes which are functions of the fifth dimension
variable $z$ of anti-de Sitter space to a corresponding hadron theory quantized
on the light front. The resulting Lorentz-invariant relativistic light-front
wave equations are functions of an invariant impact variable $\zeta$ which
measures the separation of the quark and gluonic constituents within the hadron
at equal light-front time. The result is a semi-classical frame-independent
first approximation to the spectra and light-front wavefunctions of meson and
baryon light-quark bound states, which in turn predict the behavior of the pion
and nucleon form factors. The effects of chiral symmetry breaking increase as
one goes toward large interquark separation, consistent with spectroscopic
data, and the hadron eigenstates generally have components with different
orbital angular momentum; e.g., the proton eigenstate in AdS/QCD with massless
quarks has L=0 and L=1 light-front Fock components with equal probability. The
soft-wall model also predicts the form of the non-perturbative effective
coupling $\alpha_s^{AdS}(Q)$ which agrees with the effective coupling extracted
from the Bjorken sum rule. The AdS/QCD model can be systematically improved by
using its complete orthonormal solutions to diagonalize the full QCD
light-front Hamiltonian or by applying the Lippmann-Schwinger method in order
to systematically include the QCD interaction terms. A new perspective on quark
and gluon condensates is also reviewed.
