too long

Question

I am trying to get several resource files from the server using one http request. The set of resource files is different on every http request. So the zip file needs to be created dynamically.

The best idea I have so far is to:

step1: Create a zip file containing the desired resource files using php. Similar to this http://davidwalsh.name/create-zip-php

step2: send the .zip file to the client in the browser and parse the files.

Is this the best way to do this? How do I pass a zip file to javascript and how can I store the contents of the zip file?

Answer 1

HTTP already supports gzip compression:

GZIP is usually more effective at compressing redundancies in files, which produces better compression when you have files that contain similar or repetitive information.

GZIP Support: http://www.vervestudios.co/projects/compression-tests/results

Since you need multiple files, you should tar them together before gzipping them, which you can do with PHP and PEAR's tar archive support. Then you can un-tar the files with javascript and the browser automagically handles gzip decompression.

Here's an article on the difference between zip and gzip:

Summary:

1. GZIP can achieve better compression compared to ZIP.

2. ZIP is capable of archiving and compressing multiple files, while GZIP is only capable of compression.

3. You can easily extract individual files from a large ZIP file, but not from a GZIP tarball.

4. ZIP is fairly popular on Windows, while GZIP is more popular on UNIX-like operating systems.

http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-between-zip-and-gzip/