Re: LZJU90 compression example(s)

[Ned Freed <Ned.Freed@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 	"Memory is cheap;  bandwidth is cheaper"
> 		-- Nathaniel Borenstein
 
With all due respect to Nathaniel, he got this one wrong. He's not alone; many
other people, most notably the designers of the X Windows system, also got it
wrong.

> 	Say what?   CPU is cheaper than bandwidth?   Fine.

Darn tootin it is.

> But,  like Chris said,  programmers are far more expensive than either.
> So whatever you do,  go for interoperability and simplicity.
 
Simplicity can be measured in many ways. A compression scheme for which there
is no freely available highly optimized production quality version is very
complex indeed by my measure, a compression scheme for which there is a freely
available production quality version which has been ported to dozens if not
hundreds of platforms is vastly simpler.

> 	I'd be inclined to ask for GZIP with Base 64 because I can
> plug a lot of lego blocks together at the higher level.   This would
> probably wind up as a  Content-Type: application/gzip  bundle,  which
> I don't particularly care for,  but it saves on coding costs.

You're assuming a connection between compression and content type that
does not, in fact, exist. There is absolutely no reason why gzip (or
deflate) cannot be used as a CTE.

> You
> scare me when you suggest  zlib,  because that's C that might give me
> compiler/porting problems.   (I run on a W-I-D-E range of platforms.)
 
I suggest you try it before making such assumptions. I also have to run on a
wide range of platforms, and while I've not used zlib in production (yet), I
have used it and found it to be very portable indeed.

				Ned