Xceed Streaming Compression Library is a high-performance ''raw'' compression library. It offers the ability to compress and decompress streaming data, buffers, strings or single files and supports multiple compressed data formats. Unlike Xceed Zip Compression Library, this ultra light library doesn''t offer Zip file handling capabilities.

The library offers two well-known compression algorithms to suit your application''s needs. For fast compression and decompression speeds, you can use the library''s Deflate algorithm. It''s the same one used in the industry standard zip file format and it achieves pretty good compression.

For maximum compression, the popular new BZip2 algorithm (Burrows-Wheeler Transform) is the way to go. We''ve found that BZip2 often achieves about 20% better compression on many popular file types such as database, picture, text and executable files. BZip2 is especially excellent at compressing XML data.

The library can compress and decompress GZip (.gz) and BZip2 (.bz2) files from Unix and Linux platforms, as well as handle Zlib, Info-Zip and Java-compatible data. Xceed Zip v3.x and v4.x memory-compressed (not Zip) data is also supported.

Like all Xceed components, this library is designed to be flexible yet extremely easy to use. In fact, it only takes one line of code to compress and decompress memory or files.

A single line of code can even be used to chain together multiple Xceed components like the Xceed Encryption Library and the Xceed Binary Encoding Library, so you can compress, encrypt and encode data into text just as easily.