Protege 3.4.1

edu.stanford.smi.protege.server.socket.deflate
Class PacketHeader

java.lang.Object
  extended by edu.stanford.smi.protege.server.socket.deflate.PacketHeader

public class PacketHeader
extends Object

This code is based on the ideas presented in http://javatechniques.com/blog/compressing-data-sent-over-a-socket/ by Philip Isenhour. I am very grateful for the approach that he presented. The key idea is to avoid using the GZip and the Zip streams and to use the Deflater and Inflater methods directly. In addition, Philip Isenhour essentially defines a packet type that has a header indicating the size and compressed size of the packet contents. I took these two key ideas and wrote the following code by scratch without reference to Philip Isenhour's documents. I think that some version of Philip Isenhour's ideas should find their way into the core java libraries because otherwise people will continue struggling with this problem.

I have tried several other approaches to a compressing input and compressing output stream. The first approach was to base the input and output streams on the GZip input and output stream. There are web pages on the internet that suggest that calling the GZipOutputStream's finish() method during the flush() will work. I had trouble with this approach when a write occurs on the stream after the flush() (which calls finish()). I would get exceptions indicating that the GZip Output stream was finished and therefore unwriteable.

I then tried to use the ZIPInput/OutputStreams. I would flush data by creating a ZipEntry and writing it out. This approach actually worked very well. But it had a mysterious bug where some data was either not fully written out or not read. In the rmi context things would hang. This bug was relatively rare and only happened on certain machines. I never found out what the problem was.

The beauty of Philip Isenhour's approach is that the developer can completely control how data is flushed and fully written out. The developer can also ensure that on the read method all the data is fully read. So there should not be any more rmi hangs. The only issue is whether the deflate/inflate logic is correct. This is pretty thoroughly tested in our server-client testing (though there are *always* bugs hidden somewhere).

Author:
tredmond

Field Summary
static byte[] ALIGNMENT
           
 
Constructor Summary
PacketHeader(int size, int compressedSize)
           
 
Method Summary
 int getCompressedSize()
           
 int getSize()
           
static PacketHeader read(InputStream is)
           
 void write(OutputStream os)
           
 
Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object
clone, equals, finalize, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait
 

Field Detail

ALIGNMENT

public static byte[] ALIGNMENT
Constructor Detail

PacketHeader

public PacketHeader(int size,
                    int compressedSize)
Method Detail

read

public static PacketHeader read(InputStream is)
                         throws IOException
Throws:
IOException

write

public void write(OutputStream os)
           throws IOException
Throws:
IOException

getSize

public int getSize()

getCompressedSize

public int getCompressedSize()

Protege 3.4.1

Submit a bug report or feature request
Protégé is a trademark of Stanford University.
Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Stanford University.