DEFLATE compression tools

[Tom Scavo]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 2:45 PM, Cantor, Scott <cantor.2 at osu.edu> wrote:
> On 11/23/16, 1:26 PM, "dev on behalf of Tom Scavo" <dev-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of trscavo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> May I ask how the Shib SP does this?
>
> It uses zlib.

Yes, I'm not surprised...ZLIB is a good fit for the Shibboleth SP software.

Here's an interesting historical anecdote about ZLIB.

Clients that support HTTP Compression often send the following request header:

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

If the server supports HTTP Compression at all, invariably it will
support gzip and will respond with the following response header:

Content-Encoding: gzip

In fact, Apache's mod_deflate supports only gzip. I doubt you can find
a server that supports "deflate."

Indeed, "deflate" is a misnomer. The use of word "deflate" in this
context refers to zlib. This unfortunate choice of words has resulted
in incompatibilities, which is why you won't find a server that
supports "deflate."

This is explained in more detail on the ZLIB FAQ page:
http://www.gzip.org/zlib/zlib_faq.html#faq38

Tom