GZIPping with Java - Leveraging GZIP in the Web World

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One very powerful application of the GZIP package is content compression before a Servlet response from a J2EE Web application.  Many application servers such as IBM WebSphere Application Server support Servlet Filtering, which is the act of modifying a Servlet’s response before sending it back to the client.  You can fairly easily create a Servlet filter that uses GZIP to compress the content that you are returning to a browser.  Most modern browsers have built-in functionality to decompress content that is returned in GZIP format.  For Websites that return a large amount of content, this technique can  tremendously reduce overall response time by minimizing network transfer time (which is often the bulk of the overall transaction).  Please refer to our references section for a link to Jayson Falkner’s article, which gives a detailed description on implementing a Servlet filter that does GZIP compression.
 
 
Conclusion

 

The gzip utility (and algorithm) were developed as a free alternative to the compress utility, which uses a patented algorithm.  You can learn more about these utilities at the GZIP website listed in our references section.  In this article, we showed you how to use the java.util.zip package to programmatically create and read files in the gzip format. The programmatic ability offered by the package is indispensable for programmers who want to write their own Java programs to create and read gzip format files.
 
References

1. Advantages of GZip over Zip
2. GZip homepage
3. More on the GZip Algorithm
4. PGP Website
5. RFC 1951 and RFC 1952
6. The java.util.zip package Javadoc
7. Jayson Falkner’s article on Servlet Filters
   

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