HTTP Compression with Apache Axis for Salesforce Web Services !

Though, I am speaking a lot about using WSC above Apache Axis, but today I found an interesting old post about Http compression with Apache Axis. This is interesting because, it can boost performance for those who are integrating with Salesforce web services using Java Apache Axis. Here are some benchmarks copied Salesforce WIKI :

“Your request to the server is gzipped compressed (the MC_GZIP_REQUEST property), and the request advertises (via the Accept-Encoding http header) that it’ll accept a gzipped response (the MC_ACCEPPT_GZIP property). In the case of an sforce call like Query which can return very large responses you can see some big decreases in message sizes, a quick test here shows that an uncompressed response of 376426 bytes compresses down to a measly 33617 bytes (approx 9% the original size)”

These results look great !

I haven’t tested it, but will start soon. Here are the pointers, if you want to start and give some feedback.

• http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Compression_with_Axis_1.3

• http://www.pocketsoap.com/weblog/2005/10/1565.html

• http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2005/10/compression_wit.html

Though it seems there are couple of problems, as mentioned in the WIKI article and force.com blog comments. Still, I am sure this should be doable and stable now, as all of those comments are of year 2005 and SFDC API v6, we are on SFDC API v20 now

Anyone already had hands on experience with this compression ? if YES, please share. I will write a followup post soon, about how my experiment with compression goes.