What is a good compression API for Web calls

Question

We are in the process of implementing a RESTful Web Services layer (in JAX-RS/Jersey) to handle calls from Excel to our Java back end

The data coming back to Excel is generally quite verbose, containing potentially thousands of numeric data points.

We would like to compress this and have the Excel .Net layer (or theoretically any other clients) decompress it. For extra credit, it would be nice if Excel could also compress the requests and decompress on the server.

We have heard good things and bad about Protocol Buffers but that is more a serialization technology than a compression technology

Are there any recommended text based compression technologies that we should be considering to communicate back and forth between Excel and Java?

Answer 1

You can use HTTP Compression with Apache Axis. This is a huge performance boost. For more information please refer to the link mentioned below.

http://www.tgerm.com/2010/11/http-compression-with-apache-axis-huge.html