  Light-front Fock state wavefunctions encode the bound state properties of
hadrons in terms of their quark and gluon degrees of freedom at the amplitude
level. The freedom to choose the light-like quantization four-vector provides
an explicitly covariant formulation of light-front quantization and can be used
to determine the analytic structure of light-front wave functions. The AdS/CFT
correspondence of large N_C supergravity theory in higher-dimensional anti-de
Sitter space with supersymmetric QCD in 4-dimensional space-time has
interesting implications for hadron phenomenology in the conformal limit,
including an all-orders demonstration of counting rules for exclusive
processes. String/gauge duality also predicts the QCD power-law behavior of
light-front Fock-state hadronic wavefunctions with arbitrary orbital angular
momentum at high momentum transfer. The form of these near-conformal
wavefunctions can be used as an initial ansatz for a variational treatment of
the light-front QCD Hamiltonian. I also briefly review recent work which shows
that some leading-twist phenomena such as the diffractive component of deep
inelastic scattering, single spin asymmetries, nuclear shadowing and
antishadowing cannot be computed from the LFWFs of hadrons in isolation.
