The BrowserPlus LZMA service.

Overview

LZMA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZMA) is a compression algorithm with high compression rates (~55% the size of gzip and 65% the size of bzip in one trial http://gist.github.com/59923), at the cost of increased runtime (7x slower than gzip, and almost 3x slower than bzip) and increased memory requirements at compression time. Decompressing LZMA is comparable to bzip with slightly greater memory requirements.

Given these tradeoffs, this authors claim is that LZMA is a wonderful choice for the web, especially for the uploading of user generated content.

Often, users have relatively fast machines with loads of memory, coupled swith a slow upstream connection. Being able to use a little bit of extra time in compression can effectively save time during upload, resulting in a faster/better user experience.

What's Here

The C++ implementation of a BrowserPlus service which exposes LZMA compression to the browser. This project is essentially an integration of the easylzma project into BrowserPlus