This degree dissertation has been written during seven weeks in the autumn 2004 by Daniel Sturchler and Rouven Buchi. The content is referring to the study course "Communication and computer science" at the ZHW. This document is based on the project "SMS Marketingplattform ? Technology decision and conceptual basics" of the summer semester 2004.

The idea of the application is that the user first has to register before he is allowed to send free SMS. Besides that he has the possibility to administrate his address book, create and delete receiver lists and review his sent messages and delete them.

One side of the assignment shows how the application is programmed with the Struts framework and the O/R-Mapping Tool Hibernate. On the other hand we had to analyse how the tools support the programmers work.

About Struts there is to say, that it facilitates the programmer from laborious tasks. Through the given structure of the Struts framework, many programming steps are already defined and just have to be customized by the programmer. Struts really holds what it promises by the Open Source programmer.

If we talk about Hibernate, we talk about a very complex and powerful O/R-Mapping Tool. The learning is very time-consuming, but if you have the basic understanding you can develop small web-applications as we did. Assuming the software becomes more complex the part of Hibernate also becomes more and more demanding. You have to dive deep into the technology of Hibernate and its specific properties. In fact, it has been the first time we worked with an O/R-Mapping Tool. It was a very good experience. But for further projects with an O/R-Mapping Tool we would prefer to deal with another O/R-Mapping Tool.

Even though there were some problems during the realisation, we were finally able to finish our application and meet all the requirements.