I want to create a service where people can upload files. However, since file st

Question

I want to create a service where people can upload files. However, since file storage costs money, I want to compress the files so they take less space. I would want to write my own compression algorithm, however, PHP doesn't have good ways to handle binary data (which is needed for many compression algorithms). So I wondered, what would be a better language to create such a website in?

I have knowledge of PHP (and Javascript, HTML and CSS) but no experience with other things like Ruby, Perl, Python, and other web development languages.

Explanation / Answer

PHP supports a variety of compression algorithms and popular compression libraries, like Bzip2, LZF and Rar, and for most common scenarios it provides excellent support for working with binary data. There's at least one working PHP implementation of a compression algorithm out there, proving that it's possible. PHP and any other interpreted language may prove inefficient for the task, but efficiency issues highly depend on the specifics of the implementation and the actual usage of your library, for which you don't provide enough information.

I would advise you to not try and create your own compression algorithm and use an established library instead, there's no point in reinventing the wheel. You don't have to use PHP if you don't want to, every web oriented language out there has support for popular compression libraries. You can use perl's Gzip and Zlib core modules, or Python's gzip or bzip2 modules. I don't know what kind of support for compression Ruby has, but this StackOverflow question can help you, if you choose Ruby.

But if for any reason you really want to write your own original compression algorithm, you should probably choose C. C is extremely portable* and if you manage to actually built a compression library then you can use it from PHP via an extension or in Python via a module. Both PHP extensions and Python modules are also commonly written in C, and it would be fairly easy to write one of those if you coped with writing a compression algorithm. And there's always the old school option of C web programming via CGI, if you don't mind diving into a world of hurt.

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