See what´s cooking – Brotli

In this blog section we want to inform you about topics and technologies that we are evaluating and working on to (possibly) integrate into Wisej. While this is not intended to be a roadmap, it should still give you some insights behind the scenes and a feeling of what could be included in future Wisej releases.

This time it´s more a “what´s baking” as a “what´s cooking”… This blog article is about Brotli, a new compression standard that was published by Google as an Open Source project and might replace gzip in the future.

At first it was used for font compression with the Woff2 format, supported by browsers like Chrome and Firefox. But it will be used in many more places soon including all major browsers, integration into .NET standard, support for IIS, Nginx, Apache and others.

When it comes to Wisej there are 2 places where we are using compression, i.e. gzip at the moment: the http response from the server and the websocket response from the server. While the http response is deflated by the browser, the websocket response is deflated by a javascript library that we included in the Wisej core.

In the future both components might be modified to use Brotli instead (could be optional) to gain from either larger compression rates or faster compression/deflating.

Of course the result highly depends on the type of information that is about to be compressed and the compression level that is used. You can find a lot of valuable information including various statistics here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/07/27/introducing-support-for-brotli-compression/