Folks, I have a question and I hope that someone could help me clarify it.
RFC 2616 says that the presence of a message-body in a request is signaled by the inclusion of a Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header field in the request's message-headers. The question I have is this: Does the RFC allow a POST request to contain "Transfer-Encoding: gzip" header *followed* by a compressed body? Does Tomcat support the processing of such a request? Does Apache? If they don't and we try to extend the sources to accommodate this, would that be a possible breach of specs? The application we are building involves a few hundred (perhaps thousand) devices/stations which are distributed in a fairly large territory (say, the size of Indiana) which act as mini-browsers and send information to a server (to which they connect, authenticate and all that) periodically. Now the line on which they communicate is dial-up (gsm/gprs), so being able to compress the POST requests would keep the costs down. Also, these stations/browsers might be behind a firewall, so the TCP connection can only be initiated from a station to the server and not the other way around. We were thinking of using either Tomcat or JBoss for the server, and it was not clear to us if the server would be able to handle properly a compressed request. If it does it already then maybe we missed it, and we apologize and we'd be very grateful for any pointers. One last question would be about the relative performance of compressed HTTP vs. technologies currently used for Instant Messaging such as Jabber. I know that this is too general but I'd be very interested to know if (in your experience, or just in your opinion) Jabber-like technologies are clearly superior, or clearly inferior, or simply not comparable with compressed HTTP for the kind of applications mentioned above (ministations in the field connecting to server periodically and transmitting data). I thank you in advance and am looking forward to any replies. ... Adrian P.S. Granted this may not be the forum to ask such a question. In that case let me just take back all of the above back and simply wish you a Happy Wednesday! ;-) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
