I’m happy today because I can finally announce my latest project, Debloat.

Debloat is an Enterprise-ready, extensible Java data compression/decompression framework. It supports many different compression algorithms and data encoding formats that can be plugged in as needed, using simple configuration files written in XML, or programmatically using a very simple, intuitive DSL. Debloat is Open Source and available under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.

The typical problem with data compression algorithms is that the output they produce often consists in opaque binary blobs, which nobody can inspect to see what’s inside, and it’s very hard to write tools that can operate on those blobs. Debloat solves that by using a new codec that produces easily parsed, human-readable XML files!

For example, assume you would like to compress the following string:

Trololololo lololo lololo.

A regular compression library would produce something that perhaps looks like this:

▼ï◘┘üöO♥♂)╩╧üB♣¶JÅ♂ê╝P!←

You can see that this is a complete opaque bag of random symbols corresponding to various binary values. However, Debloat produces well-formed output that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<compressedData algorithm="lz77">
  <byte value="84"/>
  <byte value="114"/>
  <byte value="111"/>
  <byte value="108"/>
  <reference distance="2" length="7"/>
  <byte value="32"/>
  <reference distance="7" length="13"/>
  <byte value="46"/>
  <byte value="10"/>
</compressedData>

Undoubtedly, this format has many, many advantages for Java Enterprise applications respect to the opaque binary blob.

I hope you try Debloat out! I have many ideas for the next few versions of Debloat, hopefully they’ll be released soon!