compactr

Compactr

A compression library for the modern web

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What is this and why does it matter?

Compactr is a library to compress and decompress Javascript objects before sending them over the web. It's immencely usefull for web applications that use sockets a lot. Smaller payloads equals better, faster throughput and less bandwidth costs.

Aren't there any other libraries out there that do this?

Yes, yes there are. Like msgpack, snappy and protocol-buffers.

Then why make another one, isn't Protobuf like... the best thing?

Why yes, Protocol Buffer is by far the better performing protocol out there, but there's a few things about it I don't like - as a Node developper.

The first thing that comes to mind is the painful management of .proto files.

Not only are they overly complex, they are also written in a different markup, which makes dynamic generation or property probing a bit of a hassle. Not to mention that you have to maintain parity across services of these messages that are more often than not a copy of your data Models. (See DRY)

So what's your solution?

Protocol Buffers are awesome. Having schemas to deflate and inflate data while maintaining some kind of validation is a great concept. Compactr's goal is to build on that to better suite Node server developement and reduce noise by allowing you to re-use your current Model schemas.

Examples, please.

For example, if you have a DB schema for users, you can use that directly as a schema for Compactr.

/* Waterline Schema (User) */

{
  id: {
    type: 'integer',
    required: true
  },
  name: {
    type: 'string',
    defaultsTo: 'John'
  }
}

/* User compessing in controller */

const Compactr = require('compactr');

User.create({ id: 0, name: 'Bruce' })
  .then(user => Compactr.encode(User, user))
  .then(deflated => /* Send encoded User */);

/* Decoding the User data */

let user = Compactr.decode(User, deflated);

Can that be used for Websockets too?

Oh yes, via webpack!

npm run build

Will generate browser-ready code!

What about Node compatibility

You need Node 6.0.0 and up

What about performances?

See this chart:

Alright, what about features?

In the near future, you will be able to:

• Use Waterline schemas
• Synchronously encode/decode
• Asynchronously encode/decode (Promise-based)
• Stream encoding-decoding
• Nested objects

Alright, I'm convinced! How can I help?

Just open an issue, identifying it as a feature that you want to tackle. Ex: STORY - [...] And we'll take the discussion there.