It is believed that high-order methods have significant advantages in simulating wave propagations. In this talk, we shall propose efficient computational techniques which can be integrated with spectral and spectral-element solvers for time-harmonic wave scattering problems. One important building block is to introduce a truly exact perfect absorbing layer (PAL) for domain truncation of the scattering problem in an unbounded domain with a bounded scatterer. This technique is based on a compression coordinate transformation (including complex and real transformations) in radial direction, and a suitable substitution of the unknown field in the artificial layer. Compared with the widely-used perfectly matched layer (PML) methods, the distinctive features of PAL lie in that (i) it is truly exact in the sense that the PAL-solution is identical to the original solution in the bounded domain reduced by the truncation layer; (ii) with the substitution, the PAL-equation is free of singular coefficients and the substituted unknown field is essentially non-oscillatory in the layer; and (iii) the construction is valid for general star-shaped domain truncation. By formulating the variational formulation in Cartesian coordinates, the implementation of this technique using standard spectral-element or finite-element methods can be made easy as a usual coding practice. We provide ample numerical examples to demonstrate that this method is highly accurate and robust for very high wavenumbers and thin layers. Then we demonstrate various applications e.g., invisibility cloaking in metamaterials.