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The "TIBCO iProcess Workspace (Browser) Configuration and Customization" guide refers to the ability to configure the Action Processor to compress its response to the client ((See "XML Response Compression" under chapter 2 "Configuring the Action Processor").

The compression feature is only available in the Java action processor. It is not supported by the .NET action processor.

The compression is implemented in the action processing using the standard GZIPOutputStream class that is part of Java 2 Platform. See this link:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/zip/GZIPOutputStream.html

There is nothing that needs to be configured in the client. The ability to uncompress the data is inherently built into the browser (both IE and Firefox). The browser knows that the data is compressed because we put an attribute in the HTTP header telling it that it is compressed, so it un-compresses it before passing it along. In other words, it is transparent to iPWB.

As for the degree of compression, there is lots of information available on the web about the performance of gzip. Here is one interesting link. I am sure there a many others.

http://book.javanb.com/servlets-and-javaserver-pages-the-j2ee_technology-web-tie r/0321136497_ch08lev1sec2.html

Of course, as always with compression, it is a tradeoff of network bandwidth vs. processing time to compress/uncompress. If the network link is fast, there will probably be no benefit in using compression.

With thanks to TIBCO Engineering (Spokane) for this input.