Compression of XML and JSON API Responses

Abstract

Web services are the de-facto standard for implementing web-based systems today, and comprise message-based interactions involving XML and JSON documents. These formats can be quite verbose, especially XML, and therefore compression of such documents can potentially improve the communication efficiency and performance of service-oriented systems. In this paper, we review the various formulations of XML compression and propose a novel technique for the same, wherein large section of the documents are substituted by numerical representations. The approach is simple yet effective, especially on small documents that constitute the bulk of communicated content in web-based systems. We conduct experiments with several datasets and demonstrate that the proposed technique for XML compression outperforms the existing state-of-the-art techniques.