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It´s a well known fact that computing devices such as the abacus were invented thousands of years ago. But it's not well known that the first use of a common computer protocol occured in the Old Testament. This, of course, was when Moses aborted the Egyptians‘ process with a control-sea...
To classify the following specifications, we have to clarify first what is meant by the terms transport, protocol, and data.
A transport does the actual connection. Its purpose is to establish a connection between two machines so that they can exchange data. The most commonly used is TCP, but it could also be HTTP, OBEX, WML or IRDA.
The data is the actual data to be synchronized. It is usually marked up with very little extra information to be easily parsable. The data formats explained here are vCard, vCalender and iCalender.
A protocol describes how the data can be exchanged during a session. Some protocols demand special data structures (e.g. LDAP), others provide support for different ones (e.g. SyncML).