Java I/O

Chapter 9. Compressing Streams

The java.util.zip package, shown in Figure 9.1, contains six stream classes and another half dozen assorted classes that read and write data in zip, gzip, and inflate/deflate formats. Java uses these classes to read and write JAR archives and to display PNG images. You can use the java.util.zip classes as general utilities for general-purpose compression and decompression. Among other things, these classes make it trivial to write a simple file compression or decompression program.

Figure 9-1. The java.util.zip package hierarchy

Inflaters and Deflaters

The java.util.zip.Deflater and java.util.zip.Inflater classes provide compression and decompression services for all other classes. They are Java’s compression and decompression engines. These classes support several related compression formats, including zlib, deflate, and gzip. These formats are documented in RFCs 1950, 1951, and 1952. (See ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/png/documents/zlib/zdoc-index.html) They all use the Lempel-Ziv 1977 (LZ77) compression algorithm (named after the inventors, Jakob Ziv and Abraham Lempel), though each has a different way of storing metadata that describes an archive’s contents. Since compression and decompression are extremely CPU-intensive operations, for the most part these classes are Java wrappers around native methods written in C. More precisely, these are wrappers ...