  We survey the interactions between foliations and contact structures in
dimension three, with an emphasis on sutured manifolds and invariants of
sutured contact manifolds. This paper contains two original results: the fact
that a closed orientable irreducible 3-manifold M with nonzero second homol-ogy
carries a hypertight contact structure and the fact that an orientable, taut,
balanced sutured 3-manifold is not a product if and only if it carries a
contact structure with nontrivial cylindrical contact homology. The proof of
the second statement uses the Handel-Miller theory of end-periodic
diffeomorphisms of end-periodic surfaces.
