GZIP Output Compression in Compojure

Compression can be handled by the server, jetty or apache but I prefer my applications handling most of their operations, so I settled on using a middleware function to add compression to parts of my application. Compojure uses middleware to selectively add functionality to handlers such as sessions. middleware functions takes handlers, after your handler completes processing the request, middleware gets a chance to transform the response, giving you a tool for abstracting common functionality.

 (defn with-gzip [handler]
   (fn [request]
     (let [response (handler request)
           out (java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream.)
           accept-encoding (.get (:headers request) "accept-encoding")]

       (if (and (not (nil? accept-encoding))
                (re-find #"gzip" accept-encoding))
         (do
           (doto (java.io.BufferedOutputStream.
                  (java.util.zip.GZIPOutputStream. out))
             (.write (.getBytes (:body response)))
             (.close))

           {:status (:status response)
            :headers (assoc (:headers response)
                       "Content-Type" "text/html"
                       "Content-Encoding" "gzip")
            :body (java.io.ByteArrayInputStream. (.toByteArray out))})
         response))))

with-gzip handler first checks the client request, if the client supports gzip compression, it uses GZIPOutputStream to compress the response, add the header telling the client that it contains compressed content. If client doesn't support gzip encoding response is not compressed.

 (defn hello-world [request]
   {:status  200
    :headers {}
    :body    "Hello, World!!"})

 (decorate hello-world
   (with-gzip))

decorate macro takes care of applying middleware to handler.

Tags: compojure