Fundamentals of the Diploma Thesis

Andreas Kraschitzer

e-mail protocols

Given that BackMeUp provides the opportunity to backup e-mails from online e-mail services, a protocol was needed to download the e-mails the user wants to back up.
Two protocols have been available which were POP3 and IMAP and it had to be decided which one will be used.
POP3 and IMAP are both Internet standard protocols operating on the application layer of the OSI model. They are both used to download emails from an online server to a local e-mail-client. In the theoretical part the functional range, the possibilities of saving e-mails and the concepts concerning security of these two protocols are explained and compared.
The practical part includes the implementation of a simple e-mail client for each protocol.
Despite the difficulties at the implementation of IMAP, it was chosen for the project. This decision was made because of its wide functional range and the fact that the JavaMail API is used which offers a complete interface to download e-mails.

Andreas Schmidhofer

programming language independent object serialization

Programs often need to transmit data to interact with other programs. Often it is not enough to transmit single values. Sometimes whole objects have to be transmitted. And this has to work between any two programs no matter which programming language they are written in.
There are some standards that support this functionality. This paper goes into detail for two of them: JSON and WSDL.
A JSON parser was developed in Java and its functionality is described in this document. It it also compared to three other JSON parsers: json.org, simple-json and gson.