A few days ago Gautier de Montmollin mentioned that the .42 release of Zip-Ada was in the works, and today it was finally released on the world.
Zip-Ada is a programming library for dealing with the Zip compressed archive file format. The full sources of Zip-Ada are in Ada, compilable on every compiler and for every system. For more details, read the files zipada.txt and zip.ads from the archive below.
New in version .42 is:
- Support for Zip archives appended to other files, like a self-extracting archive with Zip-Ada in the executable.
- Support for Unicode UTF-8 entry names within Zip archives.
- New package Zip.Compress.Deflate, with a first (weak but straightforward) compression technique for the Deflate format
For those of you wondering why one should use this library, instead of simply just using the zlib library, the answer is simple and straightforward: Independence. With Zip-Ada you can zip and unzip data without any OS-dependent external calls, which obviously is a nice thing. You should also, theoretically, get better portability, since you don’t have to worry about the existence of zlib (or similar) on the target platform. Gautier have tested Zip-Ada with several different environments, so there’s a good chance it will work on almost whatever you throw at it.
You can read the full release announcement here.
