GZIP compression filter [SPR-787]

[spring-projects-issues]

Matthew Sgarlata opened SPR-787 and commented

GZIP compression filters are one of the best examples of a great application of Filter technologies in the Servlet API. There are plenty of examples on the web, but they don't seem to have found a home in any open source frameworks. Since Spring's goal is to make working with J2EE APIs easier, I think Spring would be a perfect home for a GZIP compression filter. A compression filter is a conceptually simple application of GZIP APIs (streams, compression, Servlet API, etc) yet is surprisingly difficult to implement. Finding a home at Spring would create a standard implementation of this common feature for all to benefit.

One of the Tomcat 4.0 examples is a GZIP compression filter. However, the Tomcat team is not interested in clearly not interested in mainting it and making sure it's production-ready across application servers (else, why would they bundle it with their examples instead of giving them a proper package name, etc.). I propose we adapt the code for Spring.

Please let me know any way in which I can assist in bringing this to fruition.

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Affects: 1.1.5

Issue Links:

• gzip compression in DispatcherServlet [SPR-11714] #16336 gzip compression in DispatcherServlet

4 votes, 3 watchers

[spring-projects-issues]

Rob Harrop commented

Perhaps one for Spring Modules instead of Spring core?

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller commented

The question is: Should we provide such a ZIP filter at all?

Tomcat 5.x provides GZIP compression as part of its HTTP connector rather than as Servlet Filter. Arguably, ZIP compression should be part of the HTTP server rather than the web application itself.

Of course, a GZIP Filter within the application allows for fine-grained control over the zipping on a per-application and even per-path basis. But if this is independent of Spring and not trivial to implement, I'm not sure if this really belongs in Spring.

Juergen

[spring-projects-issues]

Daniel Campagnoli commented

There is a sourceforge project for a gzip filter that is fairly active still.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pjl-comp-filter

[spring-projects-issues]

Rob Harrop commented

This is solved in a number of different areas by a number of different products (such as Tomcat and Resin) so we feel that this is not something that we should be handling in Spring.

Juergen