Adobe Air needs HTTP gzip compression

[Quinton]

We are creating an Adobe Air application. We are actually using SOAP for service calls and based upon gzip and HTTP compression completely to tune the network performance even vaguely acceptable. SOAP seems a fat technique which really requires gzip compression to get the responses down to a reasonable size to transfer the data upon the Internet.

Adobe Air does not have any compatibility with HTTP gzip compression now and I need to make a request that such type of feature should be associated with the ASAP. We are unable to release our application until this can get reasonable network performance via HTTP gzip compression.

[Russell]

A simple method to decrease the size of data transferred upon the HTTP is to allow the web server to work with the GZIP compression on the data. When paying requests in the Flash/Flex application hosted in a web browser, the browser actually does the extraction of the GZIP-encoded data before its transferred to the Flash Player. Therefore, Flash/Flex developers need not to take the headache about GZIP-encoded data since its managed seemlessly behind the situation. However, when making an application in AIR, there is no browser to manage the GZIP compression and AIR 1.0 doesn’t have it built-in.

[MattyBoy]

I have done some of the test of such type of described technique, just to see for myself if the bandwidth securing is worth the extra processing overhead of decompressing the gzip data. (The good thing is that the decompression section is already provided feature into the AIR application -- just not the particular gzip technique . So the most processor-intensive section of the gzip decompression happens in the native code.).. I have created a project much before..

[Quinton]

So many thanks for such a wonderful replies here abnd . Much appreciated replies at all. HTTP GZIP compression is actually a big gap in the background activity of the AIR however. It is just essential - this is really not a practical to create the applications which rely on the web services/SOAP without the wire GZIP compression. This is really something which should be created into the platform, not something that we must have to managhe within the application.