JSZap: Compressing JavaScript Code

JavaScript is widely used in web-based applications, and gigabytes of JavaScript code are transmitted over the Internet every day. Current efforts to compress JavaScript to reduce network delays and server bandwidth requirements rely on syntactic changes to the source code and content encoding using gzip. This paper considers reducing the JavaScript source to a compressed Abstract Syntax Tee (AST) and transmitting it in this format. An AST-based representation has a number of benefits including reducing parsing time on the client, fast checking for well-formedness, and, as the authors show, compression.