1 Year and 70 000 views later, the stats...

So it has been just over a year, since my first blog post. Even though the whole work / life thing has kept me overly busy the last couple months, reducing me to 1-2 posts a month, it has been quite a pleasing experience blogging. I would recommend it to all developer types, it's an good way to keep you investigating, learning and having your work out there and visible to people makes you put in that little extra effort.

The actual reason for this post is for some discussion on the stats... There were 1 or 2 interesting percentages I would not have expected.

Views By Country



No big surprise that the US has the most views, this being a English technology based blog, it is however interesting that Germany is second, beating out the UK and India, both with larger populations. South Africa on the list is probably only there because I force my colleagues and friends to read it :)

Views By Browser



With this being an Java-technical-open source oriented blog makes FireFox the obvious choice to lead the browser war. However with Chrome in 2nd by a such large percentage was a bit unexpected.

Views By OS



On OS Windows is still number one. Apple is competing nicely with Linux / Unix combined, this is probably due the large apple following in the US and the boom of the iPad.

Java Compression.

In a recent project, we had to do something I had personally never really had to look at; Compression. We needed to take a couple files and images, zip them up and make them available for FTP, and yes somedays it does feel like we are back in the 90's. Besides the FTP trip into the past its was good opportunity to spend a little bit of time on the subject.

Compressing Files
So above the usual IO classes BufferedInputStream, FileOutputStream and File there are:
ZipInputStream - An input stream for reading files in the ZIP file format. Zip entries are not cached, unlike ZipFile.
ZipOutputStream - An output stream for writing files in the ZIP file format. This has a default internal buffer of 512, a BufferedOutputStream can be used to increase this.
ZipEntry - Represents an entry int a zip file.
ZipFile - Used to read entries from a zip file. The entries are cached.
CRC32 - Used to compute the CRC-32 of a data stream.


Below is an example showing how to compress and decompress files in a folder, with and without a checksum:


Compressing Objects
We didn't end up using object compression but I had a look at it anyways. I did a little generic compress / expand util, don't know if it will ever be useful. I left the input params as OutputStream and InputStream as this could theoretically be used with any stream implementation from socket communication to string manipulation.

The compression related classes being used here:
GZIPInputStream - An input stream filter for reading compressed data in the GZIP file format.
GZIPOutputStream - An output stream filter for writing compressed data in the GZIP file format. Default internal buffer of 512, use BufferedOutputStream if you require more.