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.
// Returns a JSON object but compressed.
var compressedJSON = JSONC.compress( json );
// Returns the original JSON object.
var json = JSONC.decompress( compressedJSON );
// Returns the LZW representation as string of the JSON object.
var lzwString = JSONC.pack( json );
// Returns the LZW representation as string of the JSON object.
var lzwString = JSONC.pack( json, true );
// Returns the original JSON object.
var json = JSONC.unpack( gzippedString );
// Returns the original JSON object.
var json = JSONC.unpack( gzippedString, true );
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%
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%