Architectural Design of Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface with Application-Level Base64-Encoding and Zlib Data Compression

Abstract

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style that underlies the protocol of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)and is used by web applications. The implementation of REST principles in web services is often known as RESTful API. The standard communication used in RESTful APIs uses HTTP without involving data compression. There are quite a lot of RESTful API clients in the form of mobile applications that use metered networks. Thus, reducing the required bandwidth during transmission is suggested to be beneficial. The data compression technique is widely known to reduce data size, but this additional step may yield side effects such as increased memory usage and processing time. This study aims to investigate how the data compression process, which specifically uses Zlib and Base64 encoding, may put additional load on the whole process of delivering content to a RESTful API. The performance and characteristics in terms of bandwidth saved when distributing JSON data from a RESTful API in compressed format are also be investigated. According to the experiment result, it is suggested that the compression process can reduce network bandwidth by up to 66% with negligible additional memory usage for the compression and decompression processes.