The snappy-java is a Java port of the snappy
, a fast C++ compresser/decompresser developed by Google.
## Features
* Fast compression/decompression around 200~400MB/sec.
* Less memory usage. SnappyOutputStream uses only 32KB+ in default.
* JNI-based implementation to achieve comparable performance to the native C++ version.
* Although snappy-java uses JNI, it can be used safely with multiple class loaders (e.g. Tomcat, etc.).
* Compression/decompression of Java primitive arrays (`float[]`, `double[]`, `int[]`, `short[]`, `long[]`, etc.)
* Portable across various operating systems; Snappy-java contains native libraries built for Window/Mac/Linux (64-bit). snappy-java loads one of these libraries according to your machine environment (It looks system properties, `os.name` and `os.arch`).
* Simple usage. Add the snappy-java-(version).jar file to your classpath. Then call compression/decompression methods in `org.xerial.snappy.Snappy`.
* [Framing-format support](http://snappy.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/framing_format.txt) (Since 1.1.0 version)
* OSGi support
* [Apache License Version 2.0](http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). Free for both commercial and non-commercial use.
## Performance
* Snappy's main target is very high-speed compression/decompression with reasonable compression size. So the compression ratio of snappy-java is modest and about the same as `LZF` (ranging 20%-100% according to the dataset).
* Here are some [benchmark results](https://github.com/ning/jvm-compressor-benchmark/wiki), comparing
snappy-java and the other compressors
`LZO-java`/`LZF`/`QuickLZ`/`Gzip`/`Bzip2`. Thanks [Tatu Saloranta @cotowncoder](http://twitter.com/#!/cowtowncoder) for providing the benchmark suite.
* The benchmark result indicates snappy-java is the fastest compreesor/decompressor in Java: http://ning.github.com/jvm-compressor-benchmark/results/canterbury-roundtrip-2011-07-28/index.html
* The decompression speed is twice as fast as the others: http://ning.github.com/jvm-compressor-benchmark/results/canterbury-uncompress-2011-07-28/index.html
## Download
* [Release Notes](Milestone.md)
The current stable version is available from here:
* Release version: http://central.maven.org/maven2/org/xerial/snappy/snappy-java/
* Snapshot version (the latest beta version): https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/org/xerial/snappy/snappy-java/
### Using with Maven
* Snappy-java is available from Maven's central repository:
Add the following dependency to your pom.xml:
org.xerial.snappy
snappy-java
1.1.2
jar
compile
### Using with sbt
```
libraryDependencies += "org.xerial.snappy" % "snappy-java" % "1.1.2"
```
## Usage
First, import `org.xerial.snapy.Snappy` in your Java code:
```java
import org.xerial.snappy.Snappy;
```
Then use `Snappy.compress(byte[])` and `Snappy.uncompress(byte[])`:
```java
String input = "Hello snappy-java! Snappy-java is a JNI-based wrapper of "
+ "Snappy, a fast compresser/decompresser.";
byte[] compressed = Snappy.compress(input.getBytes("UTF-8"));
byte[] uncompressed = Snappy.uncompress(compressed);
String result = new String(uncompressed, "UTF-8");
System.out.println(result);
```
In addition, high-level methods (`Snappy.compress(String)`, `Snappy.compress(float[] ..)` etc. ) and low-level ones (e.g. `Snappy.rawCompress(.. )`, `Snappy.rawUncompress(..)`, etc.), which minimize memory copies, can be used.
### Stream-based API
Stream-based compressor/decompressor `SnappyOutputStream`/`SnappyInputStream` are also available for reading/writing large data sets. `SnappyFramedOutputStream`/`SnappyFramedInputStream` can be used for the [framing format](https://code.google.com/p/snappy/source/browse/trunk/framing_format.txt).
* See also [Javadoc API](https://oss.sonatype.org/service/local/repositories/releases/archive/org/xerial/snappy/snappy-java/1.1.2/snappy-java-1.1.2-javadoc.jar/!/index.html)
#### Compatibility Notes
* `SnappyOutputStream` and `SnappyInputStream` use `[magic header:16 bytes]([block size:int32][compressed data:byte array])*` format. You can read the result of `Snappy.compress` with `SnappyInputStream`, but you cannot read the compressed data generated by `SnappyOutputStream` with `Snappy.uncompress`. Here is the compatibility matrix of data foramt:
| Write\Read | `Snappy.uncompress` | `SnappyInputStream` | `SnappyFramedInputStream` |
| --------------- |:-------------------:|:------------------:|:-----------------------:|
| `Snappy.compress` | ok | ok | x |
| `SnappyOutputStream` | x | ok | x |
| `SnappyFramedOutputStream` | x | x | ok |
### Setting classpath
If you have snappy-java-(VERSION).jar in the current directory, use `-classpath` option as follows:
$ javac -classpath ".;snappy-java-(VERSION).jar" Sample.java # in Windows
or
$ javac -classpath ".:snappy-java-(VERSION).jar" Sample.java # in Mac or Linux
## Public discussion group
Post bug reports or feature request to the Issue Tracker:
Public discussion forum is here: [Xerial Public Discussion Group)[http://groups.google.com/group/xerial?hl=en]
## Building from the source code
See the [installation instruction](https://github.com/xerial/snappy-java/blob/develop/INSTALL). Building from the source code is an option when your OS platform and CPU architecture is not supported. To build snappy-java, you need Git, JDK (1.6 or higher), g++ compiler (mingw in Windows) etc.
$ git clone https://github.com/xerial/snappy-java.git
$ cd snappy-java
$ make
When building on Solaris use
$ gmake
A file `target/snappy-java-$(version).jar` is the product additionally containing the native library built for your platform.
## Building Linux x86\_64 binary
snappy-java tries to static link libstdc++ to increase the availability for various Linux versions. However, standard distributions of 64-bit Linux OS rarely provide libstdc++ compiled with `-fPIC` option. I currently uses custom g++, compiled as follows:
```
$ cd work
$ wget (gcc-4.8.3 source)
$ tar xvfz (gcc-4.8.3.tar.gz)
$ cd gcc-4.8.3
$ ./contrib/download_prerequisites
$ cd ..
$ mkdir objdir
$ cd objdir
$ ../gcc-4.8.3/configure --prefix=$HOME/local/gcc-4.8.3 CXXFLAGS=-fPIC CFLAGS=-fPIC --enable-languages=c,c++
$ make
$ make install
```
This g++ build enables static linking of libstdc++. For more infomation on building GCC, see GCC's home page.
## Building Linux s390/s390x binaries
Older snapshots of snappy contain a buggy config.h.in that does not work properly on some big-endian platforms like Linux on IBM z (s390/s390x). Building snappy-java on s390/s390x requires fetching the snappy source from GitHub, and processing the source with autoconf to obtain a usable config.h. On a RHEL s390x system, these steps produced a working 64-bit snappy-java build (the process should be similar for other distributions):
$ sudo yum install java-1.7.1-ibm-devel libstdc++-static-devel
$ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.7.1-ibm-1.7.1.2.10-1jpp.3.el7_0.s390x
$ make USE_GIT=1 GIT_REPO_URL=https://github.com/google/snappy.git GIT_SNAPPY_BRANCH=master IBM_JDK_7=1
## Cross-compiling for other platforms
The Makefile contains rules for cross-compiling the native library for other platforms so that the snappy-java JAR can support multiple platforms. For example, to build the native libraries for x86 Linux, x86 and x86-64 Windows, and soft- and hard-float ARM:
$ make linux32 win32 win64 linux-arm linux-armhf
If you append `snappy` to the line above, it will also build the native library for the current platform and then build the snappy-java JAR (containing all native libraries built so far).
Of course, you must first have the necessary cross-compilers and development libraries installed for each target CPU and OS. For example, on Ubuntu 12.04 for x86-64, install the following packages for each target:
* linux32: `sudo apt-get install g++-multilib libc6-dev-i386 lib32stdc++6`
* win32: `sudo apt-get install g++-mingw-w64-i686`
* win64: `sudo apt-get install g++-mingw-w64-x86-64`
* arm: `sudo apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabi`
* armhf: `sudo apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf`
Unfortunately, cross-compiling for Mac OS X is not currently possible; you must compile within OS X.
If you are using Mac and openjdk7 (or higher), use the following option:
$ make native LIBNAME=libsnappyjava.dylib
## For developers
snappy-java uses sbt (simple build tool for Scala) as a build tool. Here is a simple usage
$ ./sbt # enter sbt console
> ~test # run tests upon source code change
> ~test-only * # run tests that matches a given name pattern
> publishM2 # publish jar to $HOME/.m2/repository
> package # create jar file
> findbugs # Produce findbugs report in target/findbugs
> jacoco:cover # Report the code coverage of tests to target/jacoco folder
If you need to see detailed debug messages, launch sbt with `-Dloglevel=debug` option:
```
$ ./sbt -Dloglevel=debug
```
For the details of sbt usage, see my blog post: [Building Java Projects with sbt](http://xerial.org/blog/2014/03/24/sbt/)
## Miscellaneous Notes
### Using snappy-java with Tomcat 6 (or higher) Web Server
Simply put the snappy-java's jar to WEB-INF/lib folder of your web application. Usual JNI-library specific problem no longer exists since snappy-java version 1.0.3 or higher can be loaded by multiple class loaders.
----
Snappy-java is developed by [Taro L. Saito](http://www.xerial.org/leo). Twitter [@taroleo](http://twitter.com/#!/taroleo)