Open Access

With Google’s Flutter framework continuing to grow in popularity for companies and developers alike, the need for an understanding of how to utilize the framework in a large-scale context has become more relevant than ever. The purpose of this thesis is to document the crucial steps most development teams using Flutter in a large-scale application will face. Additionally, a fully documented, large-scale reference application was generated so that other developers may use it as an aid when creating their own Flutter projects on a similar scale. Multiple steps were taken to ensure that optimal solutions were chosen for each aspect of the development process. For each of those aspects, a wide range of possible solutions were explored, compared and analysed. Finally, one of the possible solutions was chosen based on a wide range of scientific papers and community-generated sources. Additionally, an interview with an expert in the field was conducted to further validate those decisions. After the application was fully implemented, ten crucial aspects of the development process were identified. Those ten aspects are now explained in detail in this thesis. Ultimately, the knowledge provided by this thesis can act as a map for peers using Flutter in a large-scale context and help them overcome the crossroads they will most likely come to face.

This thesis presents the perspective and basis for modeling of retail electricity price components in Germany. Detailed Python models are developed to provide predictions for yearly development of average network charges, EEG, StromNEV-19 and KWK surcharges for the period 2015-2035. For network charges and EEG surcharge, scenario-B (2035) from NEP2015 has been chosen as the model scenario. For KWK surcharge, the 2025 KWK share target, set by KWKG-2016, has been chosen as the model scenario. Individual component model results are validated against available academic literature and institutional reports. Model results for EEG surcharge, indicate an increasing yearly EEG costs till 2024, after which the expiring EEG plants of past will unburden the related high costs and EEG surcharge will drop but still be around 99% of 2015 level in 2035. Model results for network charges indicate a consistently increasing yearly trend owing to high grid investments needed for reaching the target RE share of 57%. KWK model results also indicate a growing KWK surcharge until 2020 which then would remain stagnant at that level onwards. All model results are collected under three consumption categories, namely, households, privileged and nonprivileged industries. The final results indicate that the average German household will face an overall increase of around 3.37 Cents/kWh in retail electricity prices (excluding VAT) till 2028, after which the retail prices will drop a little due to dropping EEG surcharge. The similar but slightly reduced trend can be seen for nonprivileged industrial consumption. The increment effect, however, is only minute for privileged industrial consumption due to high exemptions in EEG & KWK surcharges and reduced individual network charges.

There is a dramatic shift in credit card fraud from the offline to the online world. Large online retailers have tried to establish countermeasures and transaction data analysis technologies to lower the rate of fraudulent transactions to a manageable amount. But as retailers will always have to make a trade-off between the performance of the transaction processing, the usability of the web shop, and the overall security of it, one can assume that e-commerce fraud will still happen in the future. Thus, retailers have to collaborate with relevant business partners on the incident to find a common ground and take coordinated (legal) actions against it. Trying to combine the information from different stakeholders will face issues due to different wordings and data formats, competing incentives of the stakeholders to participate on information sharing, as well as possible sharing restrictions that prevent them from making the information available to a larger audience. Moreover, as some of the information might be confidential or business-critical to at least one of the parties involved, a centralized system (e.g. a service in the public cloud) can not be used. This Master Thesis is therefore analysing how far a computer supported collaborative work system based on peer-to-peer communication and Semantic Web technologies can improve the efficiency and effectivity of e-commerce fraud investigations within an inter-institutional team.

When it comes to web applications and their dynamic content, one seemingly common trouble area is that of layouts. Frequently, web designers resort to frameworks or JavaScript-based solutions to achieve various layouts where the capabilities of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) fall short. Although the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is attempting to address the demand for more robust and concise layout solutions to handle dynamic content with the recent and upcoming specifications, a generic approach to creating layouts using constraint syntax has been proposed and implementations have been created. Yet, the introduction of constraint syntax would change the CSS paradigm in a fundamental way, demanding further analysis to determine the viability of its inclusion in core web standards. This thesis focuses on one particular aspect of the introduction of constraint syntax: how intuitive constraint syntax will be for designers. To this end, an experiment is performed involving participants thinking aloud while reading code snippets. Also, cursor movements are recorded as a proxy for eye movement over the code snippets. The results indicate that, upon first-impression, constraint syntax within CSS is not intuitive for designers.

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), auch HIPs (Human Interaction Proof) genannt, sind weit verbreitete Sicherheitsmaßnahmen im World Wide Web, die Online-Dienste vor dem Missbrauch durch automatisierte Programme schützen sollen. Dazu werden die Benutzer aufge-fordert, eine Aufgabe zu lösen, welche von Computern nicht gelöst werden kann, wie beispielsweise das Entziffern von verkrümmten Buchstaben. Durch die immer weiter verbesserten Fähigkeiten der Computerprogramme auf diesen Gebieten, wird es für die Entwickler der HIPs immer anspruchsvoller eine ausreichende Sicherheit zu garantieren. Daraus resultiert ein Zielkonflikt zwischen der Sicherheit und Gebrauchstauglichkeit der HIPs. Da die Sicherheit garantiert werden muss, leidet die Gebrauchstauglichkeit und die Benutzer sind oftmals nicht in der Lage das HIP zu lösen. Dies führte bereits in der Vergangenheit zu einer Abneigung gegenüber diesen Systemen. In dieser Arbeit wurde überprüft ob diese Abneigung durch die Verwendung von Gamifizierung, also Spielelementen, in einem neu entwickelten HIP verringert werden kann. Zusätzlich sollte geprüft werden, ob anstelle der Tastatur die Sensoren mobiler Endgeräte als Eingabe-medium dienen können. Dazu wurde durch eine Analyse von durchgeführten Angriffen auf bestehende HIPs sowie Studien zur Gebrauchs-tauglichkeit derselben ein Rahmenwerk erstellt. Dieses Rahmenwerk definiert Anforderungen, die ein sicheres und zugleich benutzerfreundliches HIP erfüllen muss. Anhand dieser Anforderungen wurde ein neues spielbasiertes HIP in Form eines Kugellabyrinths auf Basis von JavaScript und HTML5 implementiert. Der Benutzer muss durch die Neigung des Geräts eine Kugel steuern und diese innerhalb der vorge-gebenen Zeit in das Loch lenken. Die Gebrauchstauglichkeit dieses HIPs konnte durch eine Onlineumfrage bestätigt werden. Dies gilt jedoch nicht für die Sicherheit, welche durch den lesbaren Quellcode stark beeinträchtigt wird. Für diese Schwach-stelle konnte eine Lösung in Form einer Browsererweiterung durch eine Public-Key-Signatur konzipiert werden. Durch diese Erweiterung könnte auf den Einsatz von HIPs in vielen Bereichen verzichtet und andere Webanwendungen sicherer gestaltet werden.