Z'PIPE!

zpipe is not a pipe.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying!

About

zpipe exposes an interface to the DEFLATE algorithm of the ZLib compression library, it has been cross-compiled to JavaScript with Emscripten.

Motivation

• Currently no compression API exposed in browsers
• Help users suffering from poor upload bandwidth

Usage

Regular <script> include ...

<script type="text/javascript" src="zpipe.min.js"></script>
 
<script>
    var deflated = zpipe.deflate("the balloon");
 
    var inflated = zpipe.inflate(deflated); // "the balloon"
</script> 

With require() ...

var zpipe = require("zpipe");
 
var deflated = zpipe.deflate("the balloon");
 
var inflated = zpipe.inflate(deflated); // "the balloon"

Browser support

zpipe is supported in the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 7+ (Note: Use zpipe-native)
• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Opera
• Safari

Installation

Install the package with npm

$ npm install zpipe

and bundle it with Browserify.

$ browserify example.js -o bundle.js

Alternatively just add it to your Ender bundle.

$ ender add zpipe

But it's so big!

Ok 201 KB for zpipe.min.js is big, however it comes in at 57.6 KB gzipped. This is acceptable.

Tests

Test against node zlib bindings:

$ make test

Run the test in the browser by pointing your browser to test/test.html and test/test-native.html.

Character encoding

zpipe operates on octet strings only, multi-byte characters will have their high byte masked. If you want to handle multi-byte characters then you must convert your strings to UTF-8 prior to calling deflate() and then convert them back after calling inflate()

You could use utf8 or jshashes' Helpers.utf8Encode() function for this, for example.

TODO

• Support stream compression through workers
• Benchmarks