A reasonably common interface convention is to compress the contents of exchanged files, to reduce the impact on network traffic and archiving requirements. This is particularly common in Business-to-Business (B2B) scenarios, where network bandwidth is more of a constraint, as illustrated in the following figure:

Although the Oracle Service Bus does not support such interfaces "out of the box," it is reasonably straightforward to piece together a simple adapter using existing tools.

In this chapter, we will cover recipes that enable us to read/write a GZIP file using the Oracle Service Bus.

GZIP is a data compression software application, most commonly encountered as the version implemented by the GNU Project. GZIP only natively supports the compression of one file at a time (although, of course, that file may itself be the combination of several smaller files), and has a simple format consisting of compressed binary content between a standard header and footer.

J2SE includes a standard library of compression/decompression utilities in the java.util.zip package, which, among other things, includes functionality for working with the GZIP data compression algorithm.