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JSONC

Update to version 1.6.1

Changelog

Background

One of the problems you can have developing rich internet applications (RIA) using Javascript is the amount of data being transported to and from the server. When data comes from server, this data could be GZipped, but this is not possible when the big amount of data comes from the browser to the server.

JSONC is born to change the way browser vendors think and become an standard when send information to the server efficiently.

JSONC has two differents approaches to reduce the size of the amount of data to be transported:

• JSONC.compress - Compress JSON objects using a map to reduce the size of the keys in JSON objects.
  • Be careful with this method because it's really impressive if you use it with a JSON with a big amount of data, but it could be awful if you use it to compress JSON objects with small amount of data because it could increase the final size.
  • The rate compression could variate from 7.5% to 32.81% depending of the type and values of data.
• JSONC.pack - Compress JSON objects using GZIP compression algorithm, to make the job JSONC uses a modification to use the gzip library and it encodes the gzipped string with Base64 to avoid url encode.
  • Gzip - @beatgammit - https://github.com/beatgammit/gzip-js
  • Base64 - http://www.webtoolkit.info/
  • You can use pack to compress any JSON objects even if these objects are not been compressed using JSONC See Usage for more details.

Usage

Compress a JSON object:

// Returns a JSON object but compressed.
var compressedJSON = JSONC.compress( json );

Decompress a JSON object:

// Returns the original JSON object.
var json = JSONC.decompress( compressedJSON );

Compress a normal JSON object as a Gzipped string:

// Returns the LZW representation as string of the JSON object.
var lzwString = JSONC.pack( json );

Compress a JSON object as a Gzipped string after compress it using JSONC:

// Returns the LZW representation as string of the JSON object.
var lzwString = JSONC.pack( json, true );

Decompress a normal JSON object from a Gzipped string:

// Returns the original JSON object.
var json = JSONC.unpack( gzippedString );

Decompress a JSON compressed object using JSONC from a Gzipped string:

// Returns the original JSON object.
var json = JSONC.unpack( gzippedString, true );

Examples of compression

Example data.js.

Original - 17331 bytes
Compressed using JSONC - 16025 bytes
Compression rate - 7.5%


Original compressed using gzip.js - 5715 bytes
Compressed using JSONC using gzip.js - 5761 bytes


Compression rate from original to compressed using JSONC and gzip.js - 66.76%

Example data2.js.

Original - 19031 bytes
Compressed using JSONC - 12787 bytes
Compression rate - 32.81%


Original compressed using gzip.js - 4279 bytes
Compressed using JSONC using gzip.js - 4664 bytes


Compression rate from original to compressed using JSONC and gzip.js - 75.49%

Next steps

Implement the gzip class in different languages (Java, Ruby...)