Web Service Compression

We are in the process of deploying Web Services, however our Network team is concerned about the size of the SOAP/XML documents being sent over the network.

We regularly zip the contents of XML documents before sending them. So if you design your web services to take in just a compressed string, uncompress it and then start processing… that can work quite well. The java code is pretty simple to gzip something it’s only a handful of lines of java code.

Added bonus is that if the packet is scrambled during delivery it won’t decompress, so you have an added level of safety in there as well.

That’s not using any protocol type compression, rather doing it yourself. I haven’t had any experience with technologies that slot in like you’re suggesting.

I used the EDIINT package to send encrypted packets across http, but prior to using the EDIINT mechanisms, I would compress the XML document and then base64 encode it, suitable for sending.

Regards,
Nathan Lee