JAX-RS Tip of the Day: Use GZIP compression

JAX-RS (Jersey) offers a GZIP filter to compress data for responses, and to handle GZIP compressed requests. This functionality is very easy to enable, and is configurable for both requests, and responses.

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<init-param>     <param-name>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.ContainerRequestFilters</param-name>     <param-value>com.sun.jersey.api.container.filter.GZIPContentEncodingFilter</param-value> </init-param> <init-param>     <param-name>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.ContainerResponseFilters</param-name>     <param-value>com.sun.jersey.api.container.filter.GZIPContentEncodingFilter</param-value> </init-param>

That does not get much easier.


 You can prove that this works by querying your resource with Firebug, or Developer Tools (depending on browser). You can also confirm that it is working by performing a query like:

curl -HAccept-Encoding:gzip -HAccept:application/json http://localhost:8080/content-coding-gzip/webresources/widget > json.gz
gzip -v -l json.gz

method  crc     date  time           compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
defla 3a79ae18 Jan 20 15:25                1370                3389  60.3% json

The only issue that I have with the currently implemented version is that it does not use configurable compression level.